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Wall Street Worry About Unemployment and Low Wages

October 5, 2011

The Occupy Wall Street movement is starting to grab more mainstream media coverage. That’s what happens when police in the Big Apple decide that arresting 700 people, many of them unemployed youth, for trespassing is a good way to spend taxpayers’ money while the billionaires who nearly collapsed the world economy go to work unscathed in one of the world’s most powerful financial centers.

But even Wall Street does not speak and act with one voice and mind.

A story in The New Republic reports on a commentary by William H. Gross, the managing director of PIMCO, a global investment management company, who contends that high unemployment and low wages in the U.S. are hurting the ability of businesses to sell their products or collect interest on investments.

Gross says:

Almost all remedies proposed by global authorities to date have approached the problem from the standpoint of favoring capital as opposed to labor…If Main Street is unemployed and undercompensated, capital can only travel so far down Prosperity Road.

Says International President Edwin D. Hill:

The demonstrators on Wall Street are right on target when they say they are part of the 99 percent of the American people who stand to lose if our economy doesn’t recover. Now even some wealthy citizens in the remaining 1 percent are realizing that, they too, could suffer the blowback from growing income inequality in the U.S. It’s high time for our leaders in Congress to listen real hard to what they are saying.

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from flickr user R_SH