However, the ethical implications may be no less than genocide and the debt burden is a future and wealth of opportunity lost to the next generations that perhaps we cannot even calculate today.
Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at Global Insight, said he assumes that consumers reduce their spending by about 6 cents for every dollar of lost wealth.
The Social Market Foundation found that 26 to 35-year-olds were among the worst affected by the financial crash in terms of lost wealth while other groups emerged in better shape.
Since U.S. markets bottomed in March 2009, more than $8 trillion of lost wealth has been recouped.
Wealth may, further, buffer the effects of lost or temporarily low income [ 5, 15].
The damage, in terms of lost output, lost jobs, and lost wealth, is already substantial.
Trillions of dollars of wealth were lost and millions lost their homes to foreclosure as values dropped to their nadir in 2011.
"Lace, once a symbol of wealth, lost its social prestige, having been replaced by machine laces that were available to almost everyone," Ms. Smith said via e-mail.
However, the newly alarming enormity of wealth being lost by everyone may appear to justify new responses, however uncomfortable they may be.
Sardis, the focus of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis long led by Greenewalt, was the home of King Croesus, a leader of legendary wealth who lost his empire in a war with the Persians in mid-6th century B.C.
