John SchmittThe Debate Room (Bloomberg), October 21, 2011

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera English, October 21, 2011

With all the recent attention and coverage of the Occupy Wall Street (#OWS) protest, there is great interest in what exactly is being protested and the movement’s future plans. Here is a roundup of recent articles and blog posts discussing the issues and agenda of #OWS.

#OWS issues:

Mike Konczal uses posts from the #OWS-related “We are the 99%” Tumblr to gather data and identify the common concerns of blog’s posters. His quantitative approach presents the concerns in a simple manner with informative, easy-to-follow charts.

While Henry Blodget does not touch upon all the popular #OWS issues, he does paint a great story through charts about unemployment, corporate profits, income inequality and the financial sector.

Mary Pilon highlights another major #OWS issue, student-loan debt, in the WSJ blog Real Time Economics.

Catherine Rampell’s NYT Economix blog post uses annual income statistics for the top 1%, providing more information about who makes up the 99% and 1% in the United States.

Dean Baker
Debate Club (U.S. News & World Report), October 19, 2011

The growing nationwide response to the Occupy Wall Street movement displays a widespread discontent with the direction the country is taking. The economy is experiencing the worst downturn since the Great Depression, after a decade of bubble-driven growth. The banks who were the main culprits in driving the bubble are largely back on their feet, with top executives again enjoying the same sort of pay and bonuses as they had before the crash. Meanwhile the bulk of the working population continues to suffer the fallout from the crash in the form of unemployment, underemployment, and underwater mortgages. It’s not surprising that people are unhappy with this situation.

What is most important to understand is that this outcome is not just an accident of the market. The banks - who took great risk in extending the credit that fueled the bubble - are back on their feet because of extensive support from the government. This includes not only the $700 billion that Congress appropriated through the TARP, but the trillions more that were lent by the Fed through its special facilities at the peak of the crisis. In addition, an even larger amount of guarantees provided by both the Fed and the FDIC ensured that the banks could survive the crisis that they had helped to bring on.

The extensive government intervention that has allowed the financial industry to survive largely intact is not an exception. In other areas of the economy the interventions may be less transparent, but it is easy to identify ways in which the government has structured the market to redistribute income upward.

October 19, 2011

Prices Byte (October 19, 2011)