Whenever I write about Occupy Wall Street, some readers ask me if the protesters really are half-naked Communists aiming to bring down the American economic system when they’re not doing drugs or having sex in public. The answer is no. That alarmist view of the movement is a credit to the (prurient) imagination of its critics, and voyeurs of Occupy Wall Street will be disappointed. More important, while alarmists seem to think that the movement is a “mob” trying to overthrow capitalism, one can make a case that, on the contrary, it highlights the need to restore basic capitalist principles like accountability. To put it another way, this is a chance to save capitalism from crony capitalists. I’m as passionate a believer in capitalism as anyone. My Krzysztofowicz cousins (who didn’t shorten the family name) lived in Poland, and their experience with Communism taught me that the way to raise living standards is capitalism.

Recently Ben Bernanke caused a stir when he suggested that, in the future, the Fed should play a role in combating asset bubbles. Although his specific ideas are analogous to asking Al Capone to combat organized crime, Bernanke's suggestion does involve a genuine debate among academic economists: When assessing the tightness or looseness of monetary policy, should we focus narrowly on consumer prices in the current period, or should we also look at the central bank's impact on asset prices?The Austrians have always warned that a single-minded focus on consumer prices could lead to disaster. For example, during the 1920s, the official CPI and other price indices were quite stable, leading Irving Fisher  and other mainstream economists to give the Federal Reserve of the day a sweeping endorsement for maintaining the dollar's purchasing power. Yet Austrians knew that the Fed's monetary expansion — though not showing up in sharp rises in CPI — was setting the economy up for a crash. From this perspective, the huge rise and then collapse of the stock market in the late 1920s was no surprise for Austrians.

Shares of American Airlines parent AMR Corp. tumbled the most since April 2009 on growing concern the U.S. is nearing a return to recession and that the carrier may be forced to seek bankruptcy protection.Monday’s slide pointed toward a fifth straight drop for Fort Worth-based AMR, the longest streak in more than two months, and marked its biggest intraday plunge since April 27, 2009. The shares fell 53 cents, or 18 percent, to $2.42 at 11:47 a.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading.AMR has led declines this year among the largest U.S. airlines. It is headed toward a fourth consecutive annual loss, spurring bankruptcy speculation, as a slowing economy fuels investors’ belief that air travel will slump, said Ray Neidl, a Maxim Group LLC analyst in New York.