How did members of the financial industry as well as members of government use the threat of serious economic consequences to advance their agenda? What did many ordinary citizens do in response?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

: After the housing bubble crashed in 2008, a total of nine U.S. banks found themselves struggling to survive. Immediately, powerful interest groups stopped representing these banks and other financial institutions. These groups pressured lawmakers into considering an industrywide bailout based on doomsday scenarios they and their counterparts in the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department had developed. Federal officials were eagerly gauging the reaction of financial institutions as well as common citizens to the ongoing crisis, and the feeling from the financial institutions was one of doom and gloom. Financial institutions were acting collectively with the intent of convincing the federal government to throw them a life preserver, and common citizens were intently lobbying their Congressmen not to simply bail out the financial institutions at taxpayer expense. In the end, the federal government and Congress did produce a “bailout” solution, but not all financial institutions benefited equally. Some institutions like Lehman Brothers were allowed to fail, while others like Bank of America were deemed “too big to fail” and were included in a $700 billion federal bailout. In response, average citizens who were losing their homes and were not benefiting from governmental assistance began lobbying Congress to give them the same consideration it had given to the larger financial institutions. These citizens formed a social movement called Occupy Wall Street that then spread across the country. In contrast to the inside lobbying efforts of the financial institutions, the members of Occupy Wall Street used protest and civil disobedience to advance their cause because they lacked the financial and political clout of the “too big to fail” financial institutions.