Is a financial crisis a trauma? More hangs on this question than might at first appear, for if, as I hope to demonstrate, the answer is yes, then profound implications follow for issues of major importance in critical thought, including the power of symbolic systems to shape experience and material conditions, the challenge of representing disastrous events, and the status of the much-vaunted “return of the Real.” To acknowledge a financial crisis as being a trauma, in the particular sense I articulate in this essay, is to overturn conventional assumptions about the relationship between the material and the immaterial in social life. It is common, of course, for media commentators to refer to financial crises – from the Great Crash of 1929 to the Black Monday crash of 1987 to the “credit crunch” of recent years – as traumas. Academic experts in individual and collective trauma – psychologists, psychoanalysts, social scientists, historians – also frequently analyze financial upheavals in these terms. In National Trauma and Collective Memory (1998), for example, the sociologist Arthur G. Neal observes that “the initial jolt to the economic system [that] came with the stock market crash of October 24, 1929” meant that “the initial trauma of the Great Depression fell disproportionately upon the more privileged members of society who had overextended themselves in the financial markets” (42).