Dean Baker

I was waited to see if anyone would notice. USA Today gets the prize. It was pretty much inevitable that there would be a rise in used car prices following the C4C program. If you require that 900,000 trade-ins get destroyed rather than being resold, this has to create somewhat of a shortage in the […]

The Post flunks econ 101 yet again telling readers that the budget deficit threatens to lead to, among other things, a falling dollar. Of course, in econ 101 students learn that the bad story of a budget deficit is that it raises interest rates, which will raise the value of the dollar. A trade deficit, […]

The Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the government was unlikely to recover its investment in General Motors based on the history of GM’s stock prices. This is a bad metric, reporters should have looked to other analysts instead of just repeating the GAO figures. GM’s past stock prices were depressed by pension and health […]

The Washington Post had a front page news story complaining that the health care reform plans being considered by Congress will not have major savings in part because they do not include tort reform. The Post tells readers that tort reform could save $54 billion over the next decade. Let’s see, we will spend about […]

Suppose the government could temporarily prop up the price of clothes by 2-3 percent, would that be a good idea? The government certainly could temporarily inflate the price of clothes (a clothes buyers’ tax credit might do the trick), but it’s not clear that this policy would have many advocates. The situation seems different with […]

This NYT article notes that the proposal to have Fannie Mae sells its housing tax credits to Goldman Sachs is a loser for the Treasury. The article would have benefited from one additional sentence pointing out that Goldman’s claim that buying the tax credit will help the low-income housing market is therefore bogus, because the […]

It’s hard to understand this NYT article. Al Gore has been as open as possible in both his warning about the dangers of global warming and his efforts to support businesses that produce green technology. The latter obviously implies the possibility that he might profit from these investments. This article seems to imply that there […]

They have some good investigative work here, here, and here. If Fox went over Goldman with the same energy it pursued Acorn, no one in Congress would go within a mile of its lobbyists. –Dean Baker

The Post noted the 6.1 percent rise in pending home sales reported for September, following the 6.4 percent increase reported for August, and told readers that housing: “is not merely leveling off but is rising at a steady clip.” Actually, the sharp upturn in the last two months is likely due to the fact that […]

Yes, with the unemployment rate about to hit 10 percent, Robert Samuelson yet again expresses concern over the country’s biggest problem: the prospect of defaulting on its debt. Never mind that investors are prepared to hold U.S. government bonds for an interest rate of just 3.5 percent — the lowest rate (except for earlier in […]