Dean Baker

The NYT notes that interest rates have recently risen and are generally predicted to continue to rise. It then told readers: “That, economists say, is the inevitable outcome of the nation’s ballooning debt and the renewed prospect of inflation as the economy recovers from the depths of the recent recession.” Okay, what are they smoking […]

This would have been a better headline for the Washington Post article on the testimony before the crisis commission of Fannie’s former chief executive as well its top regulator. The discussion before the commission was apparently whether Fannie and Freddie were motivated by profit when they moved into Alt-A mortgages in 2005 and 2006 or […]

We need reporters to do this? In the course of the report NPR assured listeners that there was nothing that could be done about AIG’s explosive issuance of credit default swaps (CDS) because it was an insurance company that operates in hundreds of countries. And furthermore, the federal government doesn’t even regulate insurance, states do. […]

The Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th) feels so strongly that we should reduce the budget deficit that they ran yet another front page editorial on the topic. The piece told readers in the second paragraph: “This mounting government debt poses a painful choice for developed countries such as Britain, Japan and the United States: […]

The Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) told readers that: “Social Security is already draining resources from the broader federal budget, as spending on benefits has risen above this year’s Social Security tax collections.” Yes, Social Security benefit payments exceed the money currently being collected in Social Security taxes. The gap is being made […]

That is the only thing that readers can conclude from a statement in an article on Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke’s urgings to reduce the deficit. The WSJ told readers that: “The government is running a budget deficit in excess of about $1.3 trillion, more than 10% of the nation’s total economic output.” Of […]

The NYT reports that China’s government signed a deal with the state of California and General Electric to provide engineering expertise and high tech parts for the construction of high-speed rail. This is a fascinating and totally predictable story which cause great pain to many purveyors of the economic conventional wisdom (CW). China has been […]

Steven Pearlstein often has insightful columns, not today. He discusses a conference he attended in which a repeated theme was how the media contributed to the crisis with its poor reporting. He then comments: “although it’s a bit overdone, I’ll admit there is a dollop of truth in it.” A “dollop?” How about an enormous […]

David Leonhardt had a column discussing overuse of expensive medical care in the NYT today. Remarkably, this discussion did not mention the effect of patents in complicated decisions on treatment and raising costs. Patents are essential to this discussion for two reasons. First, drugs and medical tests that are very expensive are generally expensive because […]

California has done some really really stupid things (like a tax credit for first time homebuyers), but the NYT did the state and its readers a disservice in going after California’s pension fund liabilities. The basic story is that if you assume a 4.14 nominal rate of return on pension fund assets, then the state’s […]