In his Declaration of War he announced to American savers that he would debase their excess lifetime productive labor rather than allowing it to retain its value. He suggested to American savers that to retain the value of their excess lifetime productive labor they would need to gamble in the stock market. That implies that Americans who follow that suggestion may subsequently lose most or all of their savings anyway in a stock market crash that is almost certain to occur.
Losing one's life savings is the closest thing there is to dying in a war. That's because one's life savings represent an entire lifetime of productive effort which requires most of one's waking hours to accumulate. Therefore, the older the person is that Bernanke targeted, the more it is like war. 30 or 40 years of productive effort can never be recovered. This is the reason many older people die in the war on their savings, turn to drugs or alcohol, and/or commit suicide.
The point of the above is to state that the crisis war for older Americans has been "full on" since 2009.
Galbraith wrote:The worst continued to worsen. What looked one day like the end proved on the next day to have been only the beginning. Nothing could have been more ingeniously designed to maximize the suffering, and also to insure that as few people as possible escape the common misfortune.
