Dean Baker

The Washington Post’s editors apparently never heard of Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan, or Sheila Bair. How else can can one explain an editorial on dealing with “too big to fail” banks that never once mentions the solution proposed by them and thousands of others — break them up. Could the Post’s editors really be unaware […]

The first sentence of a NYT article told readers that the White House and Congress are faced with: “anxiety in financial markets about the huge federal deficit and the potential for it to become an electoral liability for Democrats.” There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever presented in the article to support this bold assertion. What […]

There is a cottage industry developing among political reporters trying to investigate whether the Obama administration’s claims on jobs created or “saved” by the stimulus are true. For example, ABC’s intrepid White House reporter Jack Tapper said on his blog: “DeSeve and Bernstein [Obama administration spokespeople] were not able to say how many of the […]

The NYT headlines tells us that: “Day After Rally, Stocks Retreat on Consumer Weakness.” The problem with this story is that anyone who carefully read the GDP report yesterday would not have been at all surprised by the data on consumer spending released today. It was already included in the third quarter GDP. Those of […]

You would think that an industry that almost completely missed an $8 trillion housing bubble would be trying to do a better job in reporting on the housing market: But that does not appear to be the case. The Census Bureau reported that the number of vacant units hit a new record high yesterday and […]

The 3.5 percent GDP growth number reported for the third quarter was widely touted in the media. Some perspective would have been helpful. In the four quarters following the end of the 74-75 recession growth averaged 6.2 percent. In the four quarters following the 1981-82 recession the economy grew at a 7.5 percent annual rate. […]

Folks may recall Rick Santelli, the commodities trader who sparked outrage when he went into a diatribe on CNBC about not wanting to pay his neighbor’s mortgage. The context was the mortgage modification program proposed by President Obama, which uses government money to provide lenders and servicers with an incentive to modify mortgages. (The money […]

One reason that there is relatively little public support for stimulus is that the public often confuses it with the $700 billion TARP. While the stimulus was about boosting the economy, the TARP was about keeping banks from sinking due to their own incompetence. It is understandable that the public would not feel warmly about […]

NPR told listeners that the government would be unlikely to get all its investment in GM back. The logic is that we are owed close to $50 billion. This gives the government claim to 61 percent of the company’s stock. However, the piece tells us that even at GM’s peak, its stock was only worth […]

USA Today tells us that the economy grew at a “torrid 3.5% rate.” In the four quarters following the 1974-75 recession the economy grew at a 6.2 percent annual rate. In the four quarters following the 1981-82 recession the economy grew at a 7.5 percent annual rate. –Dean Baker