The week that dashed baby boomers' dreams

It was the week it got personal, the week rage gave way to surrender, the week people began to say "if only" - if only they had stashed their dollars and euros and lb under their mattress or in a hole in the land.

As the financial crisis scorched its way through credit marketplace, stock portfolios, pension funds, auto dealerships, mortgage lenders and dreaming, this was the week the usual quick fixes offered only limited relief, departure many people in wealthy countries to peer into an abyss - a padded one, true, but a dark and premonition place all the same.

Of all those who watched the swooning graphs of the market describe the parabola of their luck's diminution, perhaps the legions of the baby-boom generation were the most rueful, the least probably to believe they had time to recover, the most probably to ponder the cogency of the promise after the Great Depression and World War II that things would only get good.

For the shutting decades of the 20th century, it was the shaping myth of horse opera societies that stuff improvement, passed on from coevals to coevals, was a status, an premise, and not a freak of history.

But that premise began to look questionable - to say the very least - as the crisis began to spill its toxins from the arcane mysteries of high finance into ordinary people's pocketbooks.

By depending so much on stock-based savings, the baby baby boomer were exposed to the prospect of their golden years being straitened or even canceled: paradise deferred indefinitely.

And those postwar champions of work and entitlement began to wonderment, too, about those who followed in their footsteps, fretting as much about their ability to pay college fees as their prospects of passing on a dream of self-improvement.

Even if the banking crisis is resolved, the aftermath in the broader, real economy that influences Western lives will be a world that works to different, less prosperous and less certain rhythms.

As I have observed here in recent weeks, Western pain is relative. So many people in poor parts of the world do not share in the most fundamental luxury of wealthy societies: the sure knowledge that dreams may be translated into reality by human will.

But that belief, too, began to look frayed as the savings of decades were dwindled in a matter of days, bringing a new sense not just of impotence but also of apocalypse.

As people grasped for moments of comparison to steady themselves and anchor their perceptions of the crisis, the usual points of reference looked feeble: The early 1990s, post- 9/11, the dot-com bust had all roiled the markets, but the memory some people reached for was of the 1930s.

Consider, for instance, the language of the headlines: bloodbath, carnage, slaughter. Black Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Successive lurches toward ruin seemed initially to defy interest-rate cuts and state injections of cash running into the hundreds of billions.

"How nice it would be," one reporter remarked to another, "to write the 'soared' again." And the other replied: "Except you would spell it s-w-o-r-d," denoting the slash and burn of the markets.

Not everyone saw it that way.

"The world's monetary authorities are at last really trying to reassert their power over the financial markets," the columnist Hamish McRae wrote in Britain's The Independent on Thursday. "They have not yet succeeded and they will have to do more, maybe much more, but eventually they will win. Or at least they always have in the past 75 years. You have to think that the world is facing something akin to the Great Depression of the 1930s to believe that they will fail."

But the world was different then. Globalization had not lowered national rivalries and trade barriers. China had not emerged as a huge economic power.

"Though much of the developed world may go into some sort of recession," McRae wrote, "we are not talking a decline for the world as a whole."

History might see a broader lesson in these moments of tectonic shift: Capitalism defeats communism, only to be defeated itself by its own implosive greed, forced back into the socialist ethic of state management and ownership of key parts of the economy.

But the sharper paradox may well be that, when all is said and done, the only source of renewal lies in a chastened re-emergence of the same market philosophies that have proved so fragile.

Ultimately, the hope of revival lies in a rediscovery, perhaps a redefinition, of the baby boomers' playbook: By ingenuity, by innovation, by hard work, all may be redeemed.