Blog: Beat the Press

NYT columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin warned readers that higher bank capital requirements, intended to ensure safety: “would come at the expense of economic growth as banks would make fewer loans.This is not true. The Federal Reserve Board decides on the level of reserves that it wants to pump into the financial system based on the […]

The NYT told readers that home sales are surging in advance of the April 30th expiration of the extended first-time homebuyers tax credit. While it is reasonable to expect somewhat of a surge, there is actually very little evidence of one this far. The Mortgage Bankers Association mortgage applications index has been running substantially below […]

The NYT discussed concerns that the new health care bill will do little to address the problem of overuse of certain medical procedures that drive up costs. Remarkably, the article never discusses patent monopolies, which are a major factor driving up costs and excess use. Patents lead to excess costs for two reasons. First, by […]

On April 1, 1996, way before anyone heard of a blog, Beat the Press began as a weekly commentary called “Reading Between the Lines” on the Economic Policy Institute’s website. I started writing it because I felt that major media outlets were often obscuring rather than explaining major economic issues. Since then BTP has gone […]

The Post once again used xenophobia to push its budget agenda as editorial page editor Fred Hiatt darkly warned readers that as a result of projected future budget deficits: “the United States would be increasingly at the mercy of China, Saudi Arabia and other lenders.” Of course, as every econ 101 student knows, budget deficits […]

The Washington Post is anxious to tell its readers that the government made a profit on its bailout of Citigroup. This claim gives a whole new meaning to the notion of “profit.” The government gave enormous amounts of money to Citigroup through various direct and indirect channels. It is only getting a portion of this […]

The NYT magazine featured a lengthy piece on financial regulation. Remarkably, it did not quote or cite a single person who saw the housing bubble and recognized its danger. The failure to include the views of someone who actually understood the economy makes the issues surrounding regulation appear far more complex than they are. There […]

How many NYT readers know how large $500 million is as a share of California’s budget? How about $370 million a share of Texas’ budget. My guess is that almost no one outside of the people who live in these states (and probably not even many of them) has any clue as to how large […]

It seems that a condition of being a source on the housing market for NPR is having missed the housing bubble. Morning Edition ran a piece on President Obama’s new housing plan in which Mark Zandi claimed that a main benefit was that it could stop the decline in house prices. Since there continues to […]

It seems that they haven’t. When discussing the cause of foreclosures the Post told readers that the Obama administration’s new housing plan takes aim at: “the major cause of the current wave of foreclosures: “the spike in unemployment. While the initial mortgage crisis that erupted three years ago resulted from millions of risky home loans […]