In the summer of 2008, as the administration of George W. Bush was winding down in the midst of a massive financial crisis, many Americans were outraged at the bank bailouts that Bush's Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, was designing. They were upset that a supposedly “small-government” administration was planning to dole out billions to financial institutions whose reckless habits had thrown the economy into a tailspin. The fact that Paulson had come from the bedrock of financial capitalism, Wall Street, made these heartland Americans – some of them older people living on fixed incomes – even angrier.

But the restlessness at the base of American society hit its stride only when the new Democratic administration came to power in January 2009. All through the 2008 campaign, Barack Obama had hammered the Republicans for fiscal irresponsibility, poor economic planning, and getting into bed with the bankers. But only days after his election in November, it was clear that his administration would be climbing into the same bed. By appointing a treasury secretary, Timothy Geithner, who had played a key role in the bank bailout, and an economic advisor, Larry Summers, who had, in the Clinton administration, approved banks' expansion into dangerous derivatives, Obama was signaling to financial markets that government support for banks that were considered “too big to fail” would not end with the Bush administration.