Deja Vu, It’s ‘72
Not 1972, by the way. 1772.
It seems we’ve gone through this before. Well, not this exactly, but still a credit crisis.
In 1772, local economies in the colonies started collapsing. Colonists were highly in debt to merchants in England, and when those merchants began calling in debt, companies throughout the colonies were either forced to declare bankruptcy, or to call in the debt owed to them by smaller merchants, which usually forced them into bankruptcy. According to The Unknown American Revolution, the chief political impact of the crisis was not among the nation’s poor, but the middle class, who became increasingly worried about their own precarious place in the economic spectrum.
So what happened? Well, the good news is the economy ultimately recovered. The bad news is it happened after the Revolutionary War. 
Jim: Sounds like a plan, Cam. “Hey, Queen Elizabeth! We’re declaring independence again! Let’s rumble!”