8th
President George W. Bush, with less than five months to go in his presidency, said taking over Fannie and Freddie would be “critical to returning the economy to stronger sustained growth.”
It turned out to be the beginning of something much more dire — far beyond a correction, far beyond even a garden-variety recession, far beyond anything most people had lived through.
What it turned out to be was the beginning of five weeks that shook the American financial system to its foundations. The stock market convulsed. Wall Street itself was redrawn. The word “depression” was suddenly on everyone’s lips.
One year later, the economy is only now beginning to show signs — tentative at that — of pulling out of the Great Recession, the longest economic contraction since World War II. The Dow, while still more than 30 percent off its peak, is no longer the source of a daily national ulcer.