Since the 1980s, the economy of the United States has been shaken by crises, mostly centering around the financial domain. Recessions and depressions are hardly new, but this period witnessed the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s (in which the government intervened), the sudden fall of Long-Term Capital Management, which was quickly covered by the banking sector, and the dot-com stock bubble in the 1990s. They were harbingers of the next decade when in 2008 the housing bubble, the stock market bubble, and a financial bubble led to an economic crash in the United States and throughout the world that reminded many of the Great Depression. The effects persisted into the next decade. Around the globe, unemployment rose, wages were frozen, homes were repossessed, economic inequality grew, and many experienced heightened emotional distress. The financial sector almost was brought to a halt in the United States, and from Iceland, to Ireland, to Italy, to Greece, and across the Euro zone, the banking sector almost collapsed.

To quell the financial crisis and counter the commercial recession, the United States and other countries relied on government spending and stepping into markets to stabilize them. The United States adopted a two-pronged approach to combating the crisis. The Federal Reserve pumped money into the financial sector via banks and commercial debt. To combat the commercial recession, the government engaged in massive deficit spending to revive the production and consumption of goods and services. We avoided the term, but the U.S. government partially nationalized the automobile and banking sectors. The mortgage crisis that left some people without houses received far less attention.

In spite of the distress it brought, I was fascinated by the crisis. It reflects my cross-cultural model of five economic spheres. The spheres overlap and are connected through media of exchange. As capital develops, they are increasingly abstracted from material life in the house and community but mediated through the use of money. The uses of money change with this abstraction. It remains a media of exchange, a unit of account (or tool for commensuration), and a store of value. With capitalism and the expansion of the financial spheres, however, specification or definition of money becomes fuzzy as other implements from credit cards, to gift cards, to coupons assume new uses.