Dean Baker

Relying on exchange rate measures of GDP, the Washington Post tells readers that China will soon pass Japan as the world’s second largest economy. In fact, using the far more meaningful purchasing power parity measure of output, China long passed Japan. It’s economy is now close to twice the size of Japan’s. China now buys […]

Ten percent unemployment and millions of people losing their home, that’s waaaaay more funny than anything on Jay Leno or Conan O’Brien. That is how they are playing it on Morning Edition. NPR told listeners that there are so many different theories. Yeah, I guess there are many different explanations for how human life took […]

It is important to point out that the proposed tax on high cost health insurance policies only applies to the amount over the cutoff. This means that if a plan costs $24,500, or $500 more than the new cutoff of $24,000 for a family plan, then the 40 percent tax would be applied to the […]

In September of 2008 Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke ran to Congress telling them that if they did not immediately approve $700 billion for the TARP that the economy would completely collapse. According to the NYT, he told Congress yesterday that: “stripping the Fed of its powers would leave the financial system more vulnerable […]

President Obama’s bank tax may produce some good theater, as the industry’s lobbyists warn of an impending Armageddon, but it will do little to affect the fundamentals of the financial sector. The administration was projecting that the tax would raise roughly $9 billion annually over the next decade. By comparison, the annual profits of the […]

That’s the nightmare scenario raised by the big banks in response to President Obama’s proposal to impose a tax on the largest banks equal to 9.0 billion a year. The banks argued that this would be really bad news for the economy since they would pass on the fee to their customers. It would have […]

Apparently both the Angelides Commission and the NYT missed the really remarkable part of the story of Goldman Sachs buying credit default swaps (CDS) against the collaterized debt obligations (CDO) that it was issuing. The incredible part is not that Goldman bet against its own issues, but rather that they found a sucker (AIG, and […]

Yes, I have another book. In False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, I try to correct all the ignorant experts (redundant?) who could not see the housing bubble before it burst and still cannot understand it even after the fact. It was amazing to me that so many economists, all of whom presumably learned […]

The Washington Post and USA Today both seem very excited by record profits at the Fed. If you print a lot of money, you make a lot of money. I’m not sure if that is how they want the government to deal with its debt. –Dean Baker

The Washington Post discussed President Obama’s suggestion to impose a tax on banks and including a brief mention of financial transactions taxes. Proposals for such a tax have been introduced in the House by Representative Peter Defazio and in the Senate by Tom Harkin. After noting these proposals, the article then comments: “Treasury officials oppose […]