I wanted to share this graph with you. It's not dispositive of any specific questions in itself. But it's a valuable set of data for evaluating the question we've been discussing in many posts today -- the relative size of the financial sector relative to the rest of the economy.

The graph comes from an article by Simon Johnson in the current issue of The Atlantic, 'The Quiet Coup', which I strongly recommend.

The text is a little small. So the first graph shows financial sector profits as a percentage of US business profits going back to the end of World War II. The second charts income per worker in the financial sector as a percentage of average compensation across the economy. As you can see, the pivot in each case is around 1980.

The number that jumps out at me is that at that peak point upwards of half the profits in the entire US economy was in the financial sector. And it's been near or above a third for most of the last decade. Quite apart from the public policy implications, but rather in the realm of political economy, these graphs provide a revealing look at what the 2005 push to privatize Social Security was all about and what the implications of its success could have been.

For now, late as it is, I'll leave you to make your own judgments about what it means and, I'd strongly recommend, read Johnson's article. And we'll return to this subject over the weekend.

Also check out our TPMtv interview with Johnson from last month.