Blog: Beat the Press

Robert Samuelson apparently doesn’t believe that he has much of a case for his budget deficit scare stories. How else can we explain the fact that he expresses budget deficits in dollar terms rather than as share of GDP. Yes, the budget deficit is a REALLY BIG NUMBER. That would be true even if it […]

The Post told readers that South Korea and other East Asians governments are worried that their countries will become less polluted and that wages will rise in coming years. Of course that is not exactly how the Post described the situation. The Post said that “collapsing birthrates are alarming East Asian governments, which in coming […]

Because Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke would not talk about the $8 trillion housing bubble, close to 30 million people are now either unemployed or underemployed. For some bizarre reason, policy people still have trouble talking about the bubble. For example, the NYT has an editorial discussing remedies for foreclosure which never mentions the housing […]

In a measure of ungodly stupidity Congress extended the first-time homebuyers’ tax credit to existing homeowners. Somehow, it didn’t occur to them that if someone sells their home to buy a new one it does not provide a net boost to the housing market. (One more home is purchased, one more home is put up […]

There is an ongoing refrain in economic reporting that the European welfare state is an outmoded relic that is dragging Europe into an economic abyss. It’s a very compelling tune, since it gets repeated endlessly by “experts” who pretend to know what they are talking about. The only problem is that there isn’t really any […]

The Washington Post (a.k.a. Fox on 15th Street) is once again touting the “demographic crisis” shtick, this time in reference to China. The Post tells readers that China faces a “looming demographic crisis” that: “it is going to be the first nation in the world to grow old before it gets rich. By the middle […]

The reporting on the revisions to fourth quarter GDP noted that the growth rate was revised up from 5.7 percent to 5.9 percent. However, this increase was attributable to revisions to the rate of inventory accumulation (actually slower de- accumulation). The rate of final demand growth was actually revised down from 2.2 percent to 1.9 […]

The NYT reports that strong demand is causing wages to rise rapidly in China. While the article describes this as a “labor shortage,” this is actually a normal process in a growing economy. Workers move from less productive sectors to more productive sectors. Firms that cannot afford to pay the market wage go out of […]

Fannie Mae and its sister institution Freddie Mac buy mortgages from banks. That is what they do. This means that when Fannie and Freddie lose money, they paid banks too much money for the mortgages. This point should be so simple that even an economist could understand it. This is why it is disturbing when […]

It seems that being surprised by the economy is a requirement for an economist to be a source for the Washington Post. The first sentence of a Post article on January existing home sales and GDP revisions told readers that: “Sales of previously owned houses unexpectedly slumped in January.” The main surprised economist featured in […]