This is the really terrible problem of the push to dismantle state and company pension systems and aggressively replace them with private retirement schemes and the addition of new investment systems under the guise of "retirement" plans -- it has led to the extreme growth of the quasi-snake-oil mutual fund sales industry ("financial planners" whose only job is to sell high commission funds) and has unfortunately also led to the middle working classes being very emotionally and ideologically invested in the fortunes of the stock market. They become easy victims for the process you describe, and also will push politically for anything which "makes the stock market happy" and so the bailouts of 2008, a kind of mass corporatization -- reverse socialism -- of the state not seen in the entire 20th or 19th centuries, was politically tenable in a way it wouldn't have been before.