Dean Baker

Folks who took econ 101 know that currency fluctuations are the mechanism through which trade imbalances adjust. Countries with trade deficits expect to see their currencies fall in value. This makes imports more expensive thereby reducing the amount it imports. A lower valued currency makes its exports cheaper in other countries, thereby increasing its exports. […]

David Leonhardt is upset that people on Social Security will get a $250 check from the government next year and denounces President Obama for pandering to the elderly. There is a lot of serious confusion in this piece. First, he argues that the elderly have suffered less from the downturn from other groups be comparing […]

The answer is apparently not. The New York Times reported on the recent uptick in house prices and speculated about their future direction once government aid, like the $8,000 first-time buyers’ tax credit, are removed. The article never once noted the extraordinary departure of house prices during the bubble years from their long-term trend. Almost […]

Morning Edition introduced a piece that reported on the House Financial Services Committee plans to deal with too big to fail banks by telling listeners that we had a choice last fall between allowing huge financial institutions to fail, with substantial risks to the economy, or give them hundreds of billions of dollars to keep […]

Okay, I’m not on vacation, but this is a BTP flashback. My original write-up of this NYT news article was way too positive. This article was essentially a diatribe against Germany’s welfare state. To make its case, it turned an incredible success story — Germany’s relatively low unemployment rate — into a failure. The basic […]

When GM sold off its Delphi parts division, it made a series of commitments to its unions, including that it would stand behind its pension obligations. The fact that these commitments are being honored has angered the NYT. It featured an article pointing out that union workers, who had these commitments, are doing better than […]

That is the prospect raised by a NYT article reporting that many of the top execs at AIG are being lured away to a company established by Hank Greenberg, the former CEO of AIG. It would have helpful to note that many of the people leaving the company likely played some role in either carry […]

The NYT reported on the prospects of a public insurance plan being included in a health care package and tells readers that a public plan faced opposition from conservatives “to what they considered an attack on insurance industry profits.” Okay, that is not what the article actually said. Instead it told readers that conservatives’ opposition […]

That is the implication of his complaints about the government setting salaries for the corporations that got big government bailouts. Undoubtedly the government will not get the pay scales exactly right, but it has no choice. By bailing out the likes of AIG and Citigroup the government over-rode the market determination that the correct salary […]

One of the Post’s basic journalistic principles in covering the health care debate is to ignore proposals for a single-payer, Medicare for all type system. The Post almost never mentions these proposals, even though there is far more grass roots support for a universal Medicare plan than for any other proposal on the table. Given […]