d, as has the standard of living. Individuals have to work harder for what they earn, thus having less quality time to devote to personal and family relationships. Corporate greed has also had an effect on individual attitudes about money. During the 1970s and 1980s, corporations assumed massive amounts of debt to finance mergers, leveraged buyouts, etc. Junk bonds became a popular form of investment and a quick source of profits. Former junk bond multimillionaire Michael Milken became symbolic of the avaricious mindset of this era. A characteristic of the financing frenzy was a decline in spending on true wealth, for example, equipment, new plants, research and development, etc. As the economic bubble burst in the 1990s, corporations turned to austerity measures characterized by euphemisms such as downsizing, rightsizing and restructuring. These terms translated into loss of employment for the working public. Job security became a thing of the past as American workers at corporate giants like IBM, AT&T, General Motors, and Sears joined the legions of employees cut from company payrolls (Acs and Gerlowski 1996). Personal bankruptcy, divorce and even homelessness can be traced to corporate mismanagement, past and present. In general, money conflicts differ according to generation in American society. People who grew up in the 1930s during the Great Depression emerged with a fear of the loss of money. Thus they valued money highly and tended to be thrifty and savings oriented. After the 1930s, there was a tendency to encourage spending rather than saving because of the enormous natural resources with which the United States was endowed (Karpel 1995). Those who came of age during the economic prosperity of the post-World War II era found themselves with ample resources for both consumption and savings. The baby boomer generation, generally endowed with adequate financial resources, concentrated on spending as opposed to saving. The current...
