Disaster strikes. Everyone pays because of the failures of policymakers. Major companies go down the tubes. Middle-class workers mutter about a bailout of rich fat cats living the high life. The meltdown on Wall Street? No. Try a meltdown of the market for home-owners insurance in North Carolina.

After my haircut, Hamp Dowdy would strop his razor — punctuated by a harrumph and spit of tobacco juice into his coffee can — and shave around my ears. Then he’d shake talc on a horsehair brush and swab my neck as if beating out a brushfire. My dad would squeeze his thick wallet out of his bib overalls and give the old barber a dollar. All of which helps explain why I just took part in a bank run.

Christopher Hartnett doesn’t take a thing for granted.

A few blocks away, in an executive suite 40 floors above damp streets, Bob Steel starts another day as his company’s last best hope. Just two months ago, the Durham native and former Wall Street investment banker had been lured from the Treasury Department and given a task as daunting as this day: Fix Wachovia Corp., the nation’s fourth-largest bank holding company, whose home here, along with BofA’s, makes this the nation’s No. 2 money center.

Tar Heels were no better off last year than at the start of the decade, according to the North Carolina Justice Center, a Raleigh nonprofit. Median household income stood about where it did in 2000. During that time, the percentage of residents in poverty and those without health insurance grew.

In January, James Whitehurst became president and CEO of Raleigh-based Red Hat Inc.

In 2007, Joan Myers left after nine years as president and CEO of the North Carolina Technology Association for a job at Cary-based SAS Institute, the world’s largest private software company. Less than a year later, she changed jobs again, this time to work for Fayetteville-based Partnership for Defense Innovation.

Phil Drake vowed never to go into the tax business.

September ended in the Queen City with office towers fraught with fear and tempers flaring into fights at gasoline pumps.

The way opponents tell it, a planned $2.3 billion international port in Southport would sell Wilmington down the river.

Four years ago, Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines called Dell’s decision to build a factory in Forsyth County a “special Christmas present” — one that the city, county and state promised to pay more than $300 million to get.

“We’re not a glam city,” says Roger Krupa, director of the Raleigh’s new $221 million convention center. But it has something else going for it: geek appeal.

Grandfather Mountain won’t become the Myrtle Beach of the west.

As head of Google’s new $600 million data center in Lenoir, Tom Jacobik is the local face for a faceless corporation that, depending on whom you ask, is either a kindly benefactor or a greedy behemoth.

The Belks have been operating Southern department stores since William Henry Belk set out a shingle in Monroe 120 years ago to sell overalls and boots to farmers and calico to their wives. By getting bigger, the retailer hopes to strengthen its presence in key markets and amass enough economies of scale to keep its costs low and its prices competitive.

I like to think of myself as an Average Joe Six-Pack, but I know that’s not truly the case. I have a taste for decent red wines, I shop at Harry & David, and — God bless my conservative-leaning soul — I’m even an occasional guest on my local National Public Radio affiliate, so as to maintain my media-elite street cred. But let me nonetheless don the clothes of A.J. Six-Pack here to pose this question: How is a bigger, more powerful, Merrill Lynch-owning Bank of America good for me?