In 2012 the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank estimated that during the financial crisis the net worth of American households had declined by about $17 trillion in inflation-adjusted terms, a loss of 26 percent. In a 2018 study, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco found that, 10 years after the start of the financial crisis, the country’s gross domestic product was approximately 7 percent lower than it would have been had the crisis not occurred, representing a loss of $70,000 in lifetime income for every American. Approximately 7.5 million jobs were lost between 2007 and 2009, representing a doubling of the unemployment rate, which stood at nearly 10 percent in 2010. Although the economy slowly added jobs after the start of the recovery in 2009, reducing the unemployment rate to 3.9 percent in 2018, many of the added jobs were lower paying and less secure than the ones that had been lost.

For most Americans, recovery from the financial crisis and the Great Recession was exceedingly slow. Those who had suffered the most—the millions of families who lost their homes, businesses, or savings; the millions of workers who lost their jobs and faced long-term unemployment; the millions of people who fell into poverty—continued to struggle years after the worst of the turmoil had passed. Their situation contrasted markedly with that of the bankers who had helped to create the crisis. Some of those executives lost their jobs when the extent of their mismanagement had become apparent to shareholders and the public, but those who resigned often did so with lavish bonuses (“golden parachutes”). Moreover, no American CEO or other senior executive went to jail or was even prosecuted on criminal charges—in stark contrast with earlier financial scandals, such as the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s and the bankruptcy of Enron in 2001. In general, the key leaders of financial firms, as well as other very wealthy Americans, had not lost as much in proportional terms as members of the lower and middle classes had, and by 2010 they had largely recovered their losses, while many ordinary Americans never did.

That visible disparity naturally engendered a great deal of public resentment, which coalesced in 2011 in the Occupy Wall Street movement. Taking aim at economic elites and at a political and economic system that seemed designed to serve the interests of the very wealthy—the “1 percent,” as opposed to the “99 percent”—the movement raised awareness of economic inequality in the United States, a potent issue that soon became a theme of Democratic political rhetoric at both the federal and the state levels. However, in part because the movement had no organized leadership or any concrete goals, it did not result in any specific reforms, much less in the complete transformation of “the system” that some of its members had hoped for.