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Pundits initially insisted this recession would be short and shallow. The official recession, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, lasted from March to November of 2001, but the U.S economy remained sluggish and laggard until the second quarter of 2003. The Bush administration claimed this blip of GDP growth as a miraculous recovery, and evidence of the efficacy of its perfidious tax cuts. It is important to note that this so-called recovery remains a jobless one thus far. In fact, some have even dubbed it the job-loss recovery. Between February 2001 and September 2003, Bush presided over the loss of 2.7 million jobs. The number of Americans living in poverty also increased three years running, to almost 36 million. The trade deficit and the federal debt have also ballooned by the billions, surpassing even the Gipper’s record-breakers. The debt, as of January 2005, was $7,601,173,485,023.73, and the trade deficit reached a record-breaking $617 billion in 2004. Democrats argued, throughout the 2004 campaign, that Bush’s economic record was worse than that of any presidency since Herbert Hoover’s.

Nevertheless, the 2003 recovery, tepid though it may have been, came not a minute too soon for Karl Rove and the rest of the Bush reelection team: It was the perfect justification for four more years of Reaganomic fiscal chicanery. Even though Bush inveighed against those who blame others during the 2000 campaign, and called for a new culture of responsibility, he was quick to pin the moribund economy on anything and anyone but his administration. They inherited the recession from Clinton. And there was 9-11, of course. War. War again. Bush made several references to hitting the “trifecta”—a national emergency, a recession, and a war—as a rationale for record deficit spending and subpar economic growth. He also claimed that he warned the public of the disastrous effects of the trifecta during the 2000 campaign, but no researcher has ever been able to substantiate this.

Bush certainly speaks like a populist when it comes to the economy, in keeping with his whole bullshit aura of brush-clearing folksiness. He is forever talking about his tax cuts in terms of giving just plain folks their money back, even though his tax cuts overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy. The first MBA president also delights in dispensing Econ 101 nuggets about how markets work. My favorite example is this exchange with reporters in a rib joint in Roswell in January 2004. After chiding the “high-paid” reporters for not ordering anything, he schools the press pool:

THE PRESIDENT: Stretch, thank you, this is not a press conference. This is my chance to help this lady put some money in her pocket. Let me explain how the economy works. When you spend money to buy food it helps this lady’s business. It makes it more likely somebody is going to find work. So instead of asking questions, answer mine: Are you going to buy some food?

Q: Yes.

THE PRESIDENT: Okay, good. What would you like?

Q: Ribs.

THE PRESIDENT: Ribs? Good. Let’s order up some ribs.

Yes, the laws of supply and demand are just this simple. If you can get the chintzy liberal media to pony up for some ribs, we are on the road to economic stability. Put some money in the nice lady’s pocket, Stretch.

If only Dubya would heed his own advice, and make with some kind of stimulus that actually benefits the rib-joint ladies of the land. He isn’t cutting the payroll tax, which bites into every buck the rib-joint lady makes. No, he’s slashing taxes like the dividend tax, and the estate tax, which were created for the express purpose of ensuring that the wealthy contribute their fair share to the public purse. The official recession might have ended a long time ago, but more disturbing economic trends continue unabated, and will only be exacerbated by a second Bush term.

Income inequality continues to grow at an alarming pace. The widening of the gap between the rich and the poor began in the eighties, narrowed slightly during the boom, and has only grown worse since the bust. The level of income inequality in the United States today, the distance from the top to the bottom, is comparable to what it was before the Great Depression led to increased regulation of the plutocrats, and the long boom produced the thriving middle class of the fifties and sixties. The U.S. might have the world’s biggest, most boisterous GDP, but a goodly chunk of it belongs to the super-rich, as the U.S. is home to the world’s highest concentration of billionaires. The boom may have been lauded and praised as a period of wealth generation and increased productivity, but barely any of the booty trickled down to the middle and lower classes that were producing things. Wealth was generated, but it was also concentrated.

In fact, wealth is even more concentrated than income. In 2001, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans owned 33 percent of the nation’s total wealth. The fortunate 4 percent just beneath them held 26 percent of the spoils. The bottom 62 percent, over a hundred million strong, had only 15 percent of the wealth. The majority of the recent economic gains have been made by the super-richest of the rich, the 1 percent of one, the monster-home, island-compound, and Gulfstream-jet set. In short, the boom was a fantastic time to make money if you already had the money, honey.

We shall return to the pressing problem of inequality, and record deficits and debts of varying types, but let us first recall the good times. Forget the bears. Let’s go back to the sweet, sweet bull. The nineties were a pleasingly plump decade, and there were even those who claimed that the boom proper was—and would be—longer than that, discounting the relatively shallow eight-month recession in 1990. One delightful piece of bombast from a 1997 issue of
Wired
magazine pretended to document “The Long Boom,” which went all the way from 1980 to 2020. “The Long Boom” started with Reagan, then the Internet changed everything, and by the end we were enjoying unprecedented global prosperity and girding our loins to colonize Mars. It all sounded very Tomorrow Land, in keeping with the strain of utopian libertarian capitalism that echoed through the Valley throughout the boom.

As odd as I find it to pitch my tent next to that of the nice folks who post at godblessronaldreagan.com (who insist the boom was all his doing), our prevailing cultural obsession with money and markets is, indeed, about twenty years old. The first phase of the bull market began in 1982, after the woes of the energy crisis and stagflation finally subsided. The eighties saw the election of some market-friendly conservative politicians, like Reagan and Thatcher and Mulroney, who made it very clear that the postwar period of New Deal–style social spending was over. This policy shift was a cultural shift, too. The U.S. started moving away from the manufacturing economy that had sustained the last long boom. The Rust Belt was so five minutes ago. The economy was all about Wall Street now, the white-collar wing of the growing service and information economy.

At the same time, the establishment of cable news networks resulted in increased financial coverage. Pop culture–wise, the ratings for shows like
Dallas, Dynasty,
and
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
made it clear that conspicuous consumption was one of our favorite spectator sports. But if the face of eighties’ wealth was the lizardy mug of Gordon Gekko gravely intoning “Greed is good,” the icon of the nineties’ boom was the frankly nerdy and owlishly unthreatening Bill Gates, asking you where you wanted to go today. Out with the slicked-back hair and power suits of the previous masters of the universe; this was a relaxed-fit boom all the way, where the millionaires looked like your neighbors, men in blue and beige, fellow travelers from the high school AV club. If fabulous wealth could visit the nerds from your eleventh-grade class, then surely it could visit you, too. Throughout the eighties, the public examples of richness were mostly old white guys in suits and their lacquered, bejeweled wives. In the nineties, those same old guys continued to prevail, but the boom gave us different success stories, and another financial capital. The Street still mattered, but it was the Valley that pumped up the boom and spread the idea that anyone could be a millionaire. The myth of Bill Gates, college dropout, cobbling together code in his garage, is the boom-era version of the classic Horatio Alger story. Except that the college, in this case, was Harvard, after a stint in private school.

Money and business were prevailing cultural obsessions throughout the balmy boom. CEOs, like the ubiquitous Gates, began appearing not just on the covers of financial magazines but in the mainstream press. Money was never far from the movies, be that in the form of box-office grosses, increasing special-effects budgets and star salaries, or cinematic catchphrases like “Show me the money,” courtesy of the Oscar-winning
Jerry Maguire,
and “It’s money, baby,” from the indie hit
Swingers.
There were countless celluloid paeans to the failed heist, each with loving close-ups of cases full of bills and Motown soundtracks full of payback funk. On TV,
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire
was both a big hit and a purely rhetorical question. Rap music dropped the original gangster pose for ghetto fabulousness, an odd blend of stone-cold thug and CEO, best exemplified by moguls like P. Diddy and Jay-Z. Diddy, the Homey of the Hamptons, bling-blinged and big-pimped in as much white mink and diamonds as Carol Channing. Songs like “It’s All About the Benjamins,” “Money, Cash, Hoes,” and “Dead Presidents”—“Dead presidents represent me,” raps Jay-Z—made it clear that rap stars, like the rest of their contemporary North American coevals, had their minds on their money and their money on their minds. And right next to the already famous, attractive people singing choruses to the joys of cash, there was a cast—or is that caste?—of characters famous for wealth and wealth alone.

Part of the reason that money was so very money was simply that there was more of it, and closer at hand. With the explosive growth of the ATM, it was more convenient than ever to withdraw funds—which was precisely what most people were doing, as withdrawals accounted for the majority of terminal activity. No longer did you need to wait in the line of shuffling supplicants at the bank, contemplating the wisdom of your withdrawals in the velvet-roped corral under a teller’s cool and appraising gaze; the cashbots spread everywhere, ready to spit your spondulicks at you wherever, whenever. Resistance to the cashbots—with their extra charges for adulterous withdrawals from private terminals or other banks—is futile. Banks across North America have slashed tellers and hours, forcing their customers to succumb to person-free automated convenience and pay for the privilege of so doing.

But I digress; the hordes of bank machines were not yet equipped to
print
the cash. The money was coming from somewhere. First, more people joined the workforce, as women went off to work in increasing numbers, and a double-income family became the norm. According to the U.S. Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the number of households with a pretax income above $25,000 increased to 39 percent in 1982, up from less than 5 percent in 1969, even though only 10 percent of households boasted a pretax income over $50,000 per year. By 1998, more than 50 percent of households made at least $25,000 a year, with 25 percent of those families making between 50K and 100K, and 8.6 percent raking in upwards of six digits.

It wasn’t just that more people were making more money. It wasn’t enough to make money anymore—your money had to go out and make money, too. Throughout the nineties, people looked at their lazy-ass money, snoozing away in their savings accounts, and told that money to get off the couch, quit eating bonbons, and get to work. In 1989, only 30 percent of the households covered by the Fed survey owned mutual funds or stock. By 1998, that number was near 50 percent. In 1989, 30 percent of households making between 25 and 50K had some tie to the market, through stock, mutual funds, or retirement accounts; in 1998, that figure rose to 52.7 percent. Half of those making between 50K and 100K had stocks in 1989; in 1998, that figure rose to 74.3 percent.

There’s nothing quite like people rushing out to buy stock to make more people rush out to buy stock. The market was no longer the province of the elite, of fat-cat capitalists like something out of a Sergei Eisenstein movie, gnawing their cheroots and wearing top hats and monocles. No, this new boom was supposedly for everybody, and the mutual fund ads proudly unfurled the regular faces of their just plain shareholders in countless campaigns. The nineties ushered in the concept that one should commence saving for retirement at an age more commonly associated with paying back student loans. If the pierced and tattooed youngsters in the ads didn’t start in on their retirement plans pronto, they could look forward to dog food for dinner throughout their golden years, since there certainly wouldn’t be pensions by then.

The nineties also brought us the socially responsible mutual fund, in its many odd forms. There’s the Aquinas fund, for Catholics, and the Noah fund, for Judeo-Christian investors unhampered by all those antiquated precepts about usury. This impulse was truly ecumenical; I also located IslamiQStocks, a Shari’ah-compliant fund (off-limits to U.S. and U.K. investors post–September 11), based in the ancient holy capital of the Cayman Islands. Old-school traders Smith Barney offer the Concert Social Awareness Fund, which raises the pleasing prospect of a Concert Social Awareness Fund Shareholders’ Concert, featuring ethical entertainers like Don Henley or Sting. Lest any identity limp along without its appropriate portfolio, there were also a selection of green, cruelty-free, and women’s specials.

This is not to castigate the good intentions of those who choose to invest by putting their money where their beliefs are, though it makes for a strange picture. During the boom, even the youngsters and feminists and hippies and greens and liberals and Holy Rollers who had once castigated markets for being, like, boring or patriarchal or oppressive or polluters or beasts of Babylon started playing the markets, too, provided they could afford to so do. Constituencies that used to object to the market on principle became market niches, and valuable ones at that. In February 2000, Vancouver’s Ethical Funds Inc. even went so far as to seek an injunction against Mackenzie Finance Corporation for bogarting the all-important
e
-word. Ethical Funds argued that they were the rightful owners of the registered trademarks “ethical” and “ethical funds” with respect to financial services. They’d been up and running under that name since 1986, after all, and had developed a dozen tobacco-free, no-nukes funds with $2.2 billion in assets.