I just spent the last hour reading and skimming The Candy Store Generation. Tomorrow night is writers group, and I’ll present the next chapter, titled “Boomer Congress”. Well, I’ll present at least the first part of it, about six or seven pages. Any more than that and I’d be hogging the time. The chapter is fourteen pages long, when formatted for editing as it is now. It includes a number of graphs that demonstrate the condition of our national finances. This chapter is “complete.” I could always edit it some more, look for better graphs, and find more to say.

The next chapter is titled “Boomer Corporations”. I’ve written only 332 words on this chapter. The premise is that our large corporations are being run by Baby Boomers. The Silent Generation has mostly retired, though a few hang on in corporate board rooms. The Greatest Generation is long gone from the corporate world, with almost no one still involved in running companies.

Boomers were in charge of corporations—and we could expand that to businesses, whether they were corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships—in 2008 when the great panic hit. In September 2008 the credit markets locked up for some reason. Conventional wisdom it was the poor status by the two mortgage giants, Fanny Mae and Freddie Mac, that put pressure on banks, causing them to realize their balance sheets were not what they should be. Suddenly they said they had no cash to loan.

Panic ensued in the business world. A couple of large banks failed. A.I.G., which provided business insurance to these big banks, was squeezed. Coincidentally, the nation was at the beginning of a recession. Would it be mild or severe? The auto industry in the USA was also being squeezed. Dropping sales and no credit put them in a bad spot. Gas prices had been high, further suppressing the economy.

At the same time we were in the midst of the presidential campaign, Obama vs. McCain. Obama had been in the lead, but McCain had edged ahead in the polls based on his post-convention bump. Then came The Panic of 2008. Business needed a solution, and they needed one fast. Or so they said. To whom did they turn?

To the government, of course. What more could you expect of a bunch of Baby Boomer CEOs, COO, CFOs? Children raised on debt had based their business model on borrowing. When they couldn’t borrow, they couldn’t go on. So the banks and related financial corporations, who had managed their businesses badly, ran to the government for a bailout. Though the problem was of their making, they looked for a rich uncle who could bail them out. No rich uncle in sight, or none big enough and rich enough to bail out the entire banking system and almost the entire auto industry, the government was the next best thing.

This is the essence of the chapter that I’m about to write. I need to do some research into this. I plan to use the Dow 30 Industrials as the sample group, and track the three or four top corporate officers from 1970 through 2010, finding our who they were, when they were born, and calculate their average age/birth year at various times. That’s what I did with the “Boomer Congress” chapter.

Will my research show that the Boomers were in charge of corporate America during the Panic of 2008? I think so, and I’m basing a fair amount of the book’s conclusions on that. Now is the time to do the research to back up what my gut tells me.