Wednesday, November 16

Receiving Wide Coverage ...

Occupying Hearts and Minds: The papers took a stab at weighing the future of the Occupy Wall Street protests in the daylight of a "cleared and power washed" Zuccotti Park. The Times said "questions endure about whether…the movement might lose momentum or drift into irrelevancy" without its central piece of street theater. But some organizers "acknowledged that the crackdowns by the authorities in New York and other cities might ultimately benefit the movement, which may have become too fixated on retaining the territorial footholds." Wall Street Journal, New York Times

Another article in the Times recapped the nighttime sweep by New York police and the reaction to it. The piece also gave an account of abortive back-channel contacts between city officials and protest representatives that sound a lot like back-channel overtures the world over. Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson didn't want to talk about port-a-johns for the protestors and "Han Shan, a protest member, said he had volunteered to attend specifically to make sure his compatriots were not lured into negotiations that no one in the movement was authorized to conduct." An editorial said that, for "the mayor, the test will now be how to make certain these important protests can go forward."

Et Tu, Finland? The papers covered Europe's weak third-quarter GDP report yesterday and the simultaneous selloff in European sovereign debt that the Journal said hit "everything but German bunds." The paper said: "The chorus of economists and investors calling for Europe's central bank to intervene much more decisively in bond markets is growing." The Times said the economic growth figures were "interpreted as probably a last gasp before debt problems dragged the Continent into recession." Wall Street Journal, New York Times

The Journal devoted a separate article to the GDP outturn. Another article covered a proposal by the German economic establishment to pool sovereign debt in excess of 60% of GDP in exchange for "strict economic oversight" and "constitutional debt brakes." A third article recounted comments by Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner at a forum the paper hosted, where he urged more action by the European Central Bank.

An analysis piece in the Times noted that German economic growth is healthy and unemployment in the country is the lowest it has been in more than two decades. "Germany's continued prosperity has helped fuel growing anger in countries like Greece and Spain against what is increasingly viewed as harsh German domination. More and more, Germany is cast in the role of the villain."

In Wonkblog in the Post, Ezra Klein asked, "Who has the better central bank, Europe or the U.S.?"