At this point people are still combing through the fine print of Senator Dodd's financial reform bill to determine all its ramifications, however one point is very clear in assessing the independence of the new Consumer Financial Products Protection Agency. The Fed will have control over the agency's budget. This means that if the Fed believes that the agency is causing too much trouble to the financial industry, it would have the power to squeeze its budget so that it would become less troublesome.

The projections from the Fed, the Congressional Budget Office and the Obama administration all show the unemployment rate remaining unusually high for years into the future. This may cause listeners to wonder how the pessimistic view of employment growth from Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute (my former boss), became the "dissenting opinion."

--Dean Baker

The NYT told readers that: "China is the biggest buyer of Treasury bonds at a time when the United States has record budget deficits and needs China to keep buying those bonds to finance American debt."

Nope, this is nonsense. People can get the real story from today's Krugman column, China has an unloaded water pistol pointed at our heads.

--Dean Baker

Japan is an extremely densely populated country. Because of its low birth rate and immigration rate, it is likely to become less crowded in the future. While most normal people would probably consider this a positive development, the Washington Post ran an Outlook piece expressing horror at this prospect.

The headline tells readers that: "even as population shrinks, Japan remains wary of immigration." It goes on to warn of a "demographic crisis," telling readers that:

The media reported on a 0.3 percent rise in retail sales in February, which was described as a surprisingly strong result compared with the consensus expectation of a 0.2 percent decline. However, the news was not as good as this may appear, since January's sales data was revised down by 0.4 percent. In other words, the sales volume reported for February was almost exactly in line with the consensus estimate, even though the January number is less than had previously been believed. (There does appear to be some upward movement in non-auto sales.)

--Dean Baker

The Washington Post is a huge supporter of trade agreements like NAFTA that put non-college educated workers in direct competition with low-paid workers in the developing world, while largely protecting the most highly educated workers like doctors and lawyers. They push this selective protectionism by calling it "free trade." They also call anyone who disagrees with their agenda of selective protectionism, which is designed to redistribute income upward, a protectionist.

The paper really outdid itself today with a front page editorial that used the term "free trade" in the headline and 7 other times in a 900 word article.

--Dean Baker

Peter Peterson, the billionaire Wall Street investment banker, is devoting more than $1 billion to a campaign to whip up fears about budget deficits in order to force cuts in Social Security and Medicare. It almost looks as though the NYT has joined the effort.

It printed an article today that uses a measure of government debt that is explicitly designed to be misleading. The article reports on the debt of Greece, but then adds in a discussion of the debts of other countries, including the United States.