With the largest bank collapse in U.S. history hanging over desperate political negotiations on the proposed $700 billion Wall Street bailout, economic anxiety is running high across the country. City Weekly asked Michael Berry of Michael Berry Custom Framing how he thought Americans might handle a new Great Depression:
We seem to be pretty terrified. As a group, it doesn’t take too much to really rattle us, which really surprises me. We think of ourselves as the greatest nation economically, or strong militarily, and then something happens and we fall all to pieces. We throw out our Constitution; we lose all of our fundamentals because we’re terrified. So, if something happened like a Great Depression, I don’t think we would handle it very well.