Blog: Beat the Press

The NYT had an interesting piece on counterfeit drugs in Russia. It reports that counterfeits may account for as much as 30 percent of total sales. This is what happens when the government creates an artificial monopoly with patent protection. Just as the Soviet Union couldn’t prevent black market sales of blue jeans, Russia can’t […]

If Social Security was a private corporation, Tim Russert would be unemployed and NBC would be out of business. (When you misrepresent the financial state of a private business in the way that Russert misrepresents the financial state of Social Security, you get sued for libel.) Note how the fact that Social Security, Medicare, and […]

The NYT�s Europe-bashing desk pulled out the stops today in going after Germany. Readers would have learned about Germany�s �chronic double-digit inflation.� This surely would be news to most readers, since the OECD puts Germany�s inflation rate over the last year at just over 2.0 percent. Perhaps the article meant to say �chronic double-digit unemployment.� […]

No, that’s not me rooting for a quick end to the housing bubble; those are the words of David Lereah, the chief economist of the National Association of Realtors, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal. Yes, this is the same economist who until recently was assuring buyers that house prices will never fall. The […]

The standard story of financial bubbles has that financing gets progressively more tenuous as the bubble expands. BusinessWeek has a nice piece about the latest and most pernicious financial innovation of the current bubble, the option ARM. It’s too bad that no one in a position of authority was awake before the bubble grew to […]

Regular users of government data (like reporters) should know its limitations. Many of the series are highly erratic, meaning that any individual number contains a considerable amount of error and a limited amount of information. The hourly wage data very much fit this bill. In the real world, hourly wage growth doesn�t change very much […]

The Post has an article headlined “Fast-Growing Countries to Gain More Clout at IMF.” The list of countries is China, South Korea, Turkey, and Mexico. The first three countries can reasonably be described as “fast-growing,” but not Mexico. Mexico’s per capita GDP growth has averaged just 1 percent annually for the last decade, a slow […]

The Times ran an article about India�s rise as a manufacturing force. Much of it is informative, but some of it is painful. In the painful category is the claim that global manufacturers are turning to India because of �a serious demographic squeeze facing China.� It then goes on to point out that although China […]

A New York Times article today commented on the extraordinary jump in wages over the last two quarters. Before anyone breaks out the champagne, take a look at the statistical discrepancy in the GDP accounts. This might be is a bit nerdy, but there is an important story here. In principle, it is possible to […]

Like the exclusive WASP-only country club that opens the door to blacks and Jews after it can no longer raise the money to fix the roof, the I.M.F. is inviting China to play a larger role. The problem is that it is far too late to invite China to be a junior partner in this […]