Dean Baker

The Post yet again could not resist the urge to editorialize on the deficit in a news story, referring to it as “skyrocketing.” Of course the debt is increasing rapidly as a result of the downturn caused by the economic mismanagement of Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, but if the economy recovers as predicted, then […]

A NYT article that discussed the Obama administration’s plans to prohibit proprietary trading by large commercial banks told readers that: “big losses in the trading of those securities precipitated the credit crisis in 2008 and the federal bailout.” This is not accurate. Banks suffered big losses on their holdings of both mortgages and mortgage-backed securities. […]

There is another round of news pieces about China becoming the world’s second largest economy, for example the NYT headlined a piece that discussed this possibility, and NPR mentioned it in Morning Edition’s top of the hour news segment. This is really really silly. China has long been the second largest economy using a purchasing […]

In discussing the victory of a center-right candidate over his center-left opponent, the NYT told readers that: “The winner, Sebastián Piñera, 60, joins Alan García of Peru, Felipe Calderón of Mexico and Álvaro Uribe of Colombia as clearly right-wing leaders presiding over major Latin American countries, where left-wing candidates with socialist agendas have held more […]

The Washington Post doesn’t seem to think they will. In an article on the creation of a special deficit commission that will issue a report that will be voted on after the November election, the Post tells readers that: “the commission would deliver its recommendations after this fall’s congressional elections, postponing potentially painful decisions about […]

Andrew Ross Sorkin did a good job of making things up to argue that we shouldn’t have a policy against “too big to fail banks.” Sorkin argued the need for big banks by telling readers that: “If Pfizer, for example, needs to raise $20 billion for a takeover bid, or Verizon needs to raise billions […]

Floyd Norris had a column in the NYT yesterday noting that recessions with sharp job declines tend to be followed by sharp rebounds. This has been a past pattern, but it is likely not to hold in this case because the nature of the downturn is different. The past downturns would brought about by the […]

The NYT reports that Johnson & Johnson paid kickbacks to a pharmacy company to get it to distribute its drugs for unauthorized uses to nursing home residents. This article would have benefited from some economic analysis. This is the textbook response that would be predicted from government interference in a market through the granting of […]

The Federal Reserve Board reported that industrial production increased by 0.6 percent in December. This would ordinarily be good news, except that a closer examination showed that manufacturing output actually shrank slightly for the month.The December increase was driven almost entirely by a 5.9 percent jump in output at utilities. This tells us about the […]

Michael Grunwald at Time Magazine does some first class apologetics for Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner in his latest column. He repeats the line that we should be thankful to Geithner and company that we didn’t have another Great Depression. While we all should be happy that we didn’t get another Great Depression, the only reason […]