Current status of the economy. Fall. 2013.

Economic Policy Institute.

A Decade of Flat Wages: The Key Barrier to Shared Prosperity and a Rising Middle Class

August 21, 2013 | By Lawrence Mishel and Heidi Shierholz | REPORT

California.

UNEVEN PROGRESS: WHAT THE ECONOMIC RECOVERY HAS MEANT

FOR CALIFORNIA’S WORKERS. California Budget Project.  www.cbp.org

Joe Stiglitz's speech at the AFL-CIO convention

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel Prize winning economist.

Wealthiest Americans Take Home Biggest Share of Income Ever Recorded | News & Notes, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

Wealthiest Americans Take Home Biggest Share of Income Ever Recorded | News & Notes, What Matters Today | BillMoyers.com

Financial Crisis- Could it happen again?

USA Today's view. Could the financial crisis happen again?

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/09/08/legacy-2008-financial-crisis-lehman/2723733/

The Lehman Collapse

Five years after Lehman’s collapse hastened a worldwide economic panic, the government faces lingering questions about the decision to spare executives likeRichard S. Fuld Jr., who ran Lehman for 14 years until its demise. Not a single senior executive from any Wall Street bank faced criminal charges from the crisis, either. And the government’s deadline for filing most charges will expire this month, the anniversary of Lehman’s collapse, providing a reminder of the case and its unpopular outcome.

Federal prosecutors and the S.E.C. have never officially announced their decision to close the Lehman investigation.

New York Times.  9/9/2013. Page A-1.
Also: from Robert Reich.

Happy Anniversary Lehman Brothers, And What We Haven’t Learned about Wall Street Over the Past Five Years

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2013

While attention is focused on Syria, the gambling addiction of Wall Street’s biggest banks is more dangerous than ever.

Five years ago this September, Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and the Street hurtled toward the worst financial crisis in eighty years. Yet the biggest Wall Street banks are far larger now than they were then. And the Dodd-Frank rules designed to stop them from betting with the insured deposits of ordinary savers are still on the drawing boards — courtesy of the banks’ lobbying prowess. The so-called Volcker Rule has yet to see the light of day.

Paul Krugman: The Present Crisis. Sept. 6,2013

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  September 5, 2013 Today's Op Ed . 

Years of Tragic Waste

By PAUL KRUGMAN

In a few days, we’ll reach the fifth anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers — the moment when a recession, which was bad enough, turned into something much scarier. Suddenly, we were looking at the real possibility of economic catastrophe.

And the catastrophe came.

Wait, you say, what catastrophe? Weren’t people warning about a second Great Depression? And that didn’t happen, did it? Yes, they were, and no, it didn’t — although the Greeks, the Spaniards, and others might not agree about that second point. The important thing, however, is to realize that there are degrees of disaster, that you can have an immense failure of economic policy that falls short of producing total collapse. And the failure of policy these past five years has, in fact, been immense.

Some of that immensity can be measured in dollars and cents. Reasonable measures of the “output gap” over the past five years — the difference between the value of goods and services America could and should have produced and what it actually produced — run well over $2 trillion. That’s trillions of dollars of pure waste, which we will never get back.

Retirement Inequality Chartbook: How the 401(k) revolution created a few big winners and many losers | Economic Policy Institute

Retirement Inequality Chartbook: How the 401(k) revolution created a few big winners and many losers | Economic Policy Institute