Peter Gosselin, national economics correspondent for the Los Angeles Times, visits Zócalo to discuss the themes in his latest book, High Wire: The Precarious Financial Lives of American Families. For a brief, shining moment in the late 1990s, a broad consensus reigned among Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and liberals, business executives and union leaders. The great mass of Americans had reached a new plateau where we no longer had to rely on labor alone to support our families and ourselves, but had assets as well. With them, we could play right along with the wizards of Wall Street, investing, hedging, diversifying our ways to the good life and maybe something fabulously better.

But a stock crash and housing collapse later, the promise of the ownership society looks nowhere near as bright. One year into the current crisis, most commentators explain it as the product of a few million peculiar mortgages or too much borrowing or the fact that something we thought could only go up—the value of our homes—went down. But there’s a deeper lesson: Families, it turns out, are not like every other economic unit; households are not hedge funds. The great economic consensus of the late Nineties—a quarter century in the making—was flawed from the get-go. Gosselin explains not only how families from the working poor to the reasonably rich should think about their current financial condition, he’ll tell us what can be done about it.