Dean Baker

David Leonhardt comes out strongly in the middle on current trends in mortgage financing. He rightly notes the benefits of increased access to credit, but he does exaggerate the case somewhat. The column points to the fact that mortgage fees have fallen by 80 percent as a share of mortgage values over the last two […]

I generally give the NYT magazine more license than the rest of the newspaper. After all, it prints longer, more literary pieces, not straight news. But, I am still old-fashioned enough to think that being literary should not prevent one from being able to use logic. The “Pop Psychology” piece in Sunday’s NYT fails the […]

The Post is guilty of some seriously lazy reporting in its lead story on the Democrat’s bill for Iraq War funding. The article reports that the bill includes $21 billion in funding that President Bush did not request. It gives several examples of items that seem to fit the definition of pork, but then notes […]

The WSJ decided to highlight a 3-month old study to tell readers that everything is fine with the mortage market. While the study (by Christopher Cagan at First American CoreLogic) presents a reasonable breakdown of the risks of mortgage defaults, the problem with the WSJ assessment is that it is based on the assumption that […]

For some bizarre reason the idea of “wage insurance” continually pops up in the discussion of trade. Wage insurance is a mechanism for replacing some of the wages that workers might lose if they leave a good-paying job and are forced to take a new one at a lower wage. Most proposls call for making […]

The Post article on the February jump in the CPI includes a chart (not on the web) showing the monthly increase in the CPI and the monthly change in real weekly wages. This juxtaposition doesn’t make sense for several reasons. First, if you’re comparing wage growth to inflation, then the appropriate figure is nominal wage […]

The NYT has a nice piece today. It’s a bit late and doesn’t go far enough in fingering all the villians (some of whom were well-meaning, but hopelessly naive), but it’s a start. –Dean Baker

I was just watching David Brancaccio on NOW discussing with a guest how it would be desirable to encourage shareholders to take a longterm perspective. What was Mr. Brancaccio’s proposal? Eliminate capital gains tax on shares held for more than ten years. What a fantastic idea!!! Why should anyone expect Bill Gates to pay the […]

The media largely ignored the 1.3 percent rise in the finished goods index reported for February. The monthly data are always erratic, and this increase was driven largely by jumps in food and energy prices, but even the core index rose by 0.4 percent. Furthermore, I’m beginning to think that some of the food price […]

The Washington Post gives us another budget article chock full of big numbers that will be almost meaningless to anyone who reads it. (Next time i will list the names of the 47 budget wonks who can make sense of this sort of article). This is not reporting. Reporting is supposed to convey information. Writing […]