NON-FICTION
Baby Boomer Bust?
"With the opening chords to Gimme Some Lovin' by the Spencer Davis Group -- classic 60's rock -- pulsating underneath, Hopper goes on to tell us that, 'Your generation is definitely not heading for Bingo Night. In fact, you can write a book about how you're going to turn retirement upside down.'
In an odd sort of way, this is that book.
Unfortunately, it's not about turning retirement upside down in quite the way that Hopper and Ameriprise, the sponsor of the ad, envisioned. We're going to turn it upside down because most of us are pulling our collective hairs out of our heads in a state of outright panic and shock."
Introduction
"But ultimately it was greed that caused the downturn; growing rapidly in a Petri dish of a laissez-faire business environment thanks to Phil
Gramm and his free market advocates, abetted by the Bush tax cuts, enabled by the Clinton administrations liberalized housing policies and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, hawked on the street by hucksters like Mozilo and Countrywide, and sliced and diced by Wall Street into parasitic toxic monsters that would eventually feed on their very makers...."
p. 43
"Just like Dorothy in the Wizard of OZ, perhaps we needed to endure a cataclysmic cyclone, a bumpy trip down the yellow brick road, with cohorts seeking a brain, a heart and courage, to visit a wonderful wizard who asks us to battle wicked witches, flying monkeys to prove our worthy only to discover that the wizard wasn't a wizard after all. Instead, we discovered something infinitely better: Like our sheet-metal-worker turned librarian, we discovered we always had the capacity inherently, deep-rooted in our very humanity, to solve the problem on our own."
p. 186
How the generation of promise became the generation of panic.
Author
Roger Chiocchi
Number of Pages
186
Year of issue
2010
about this book
Baby Boomer Bust? examines and analyzes the meltdown of 2008/2009 from economic, political and social perspectives and illuminates how the meltdown has directly impacted Baby Boomers — once known as the generation of promise, but now the generation of panic. It examines the downturn’s impact on Boomers’ lifestyles, dreams, aspirations and future plans. Baby Boomer Bust? raises some provocative questions regarding the generation’s ability to survive the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.
Baby Boomer Bust? examines and analyzes the meltdown of 2008/2009 from economic, political and social perspectives and illuminates how the meltdown has directly impacted Baby Boomers — once known as the generation of promise, but now the generation of panic. It examines the downturn’s impact on Boomers’ lifestyles, dreams, aspirations and future plans. We examine the consequences of the crash through the eyes of nine different boomers
Dick Saughnessy – a telecommunications manager at Citigroup who was just on the cusp of retirement when Citgroup’s stock nosedived and wiped out his retirement nest egg.
Donna Dellasandro – who went from relatively affluent to virtually penniless.
Kurt Simpson – a marketing executive who, due to several career hiatuses, became gainfully employed, but penniless.
Ian Stein – a well-regarded broadcast journalist who left a prestigious job to pursue his dream of producing a documentary.
John Perotti – once a successful high-earning trader on Wall St., he was forced to take a job as a bartender.
John and Georgia Albee – they worked hard for 30 years to build a successful car dealership but almost lost it all due to Chrysler’s financial problems.
Dan Besso – a retired police officer who parlayed his pension and retirement funds into a successful home security business.
Scott Divak – an advertising copywriter who has been laid off again and again but has always demonstrated the resiliency to bounce back.
Baby Boomer Bust? raises some provocative questions regarding the generation’s ability to survive the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.