Blog: Beat the Press

The NYT notes the recent decline in the euro and points out some of the negative economic effects (e.g. higher oil prices), then tells readers: “more important, there is a queasy feeling that the decline of the euro makes an uncomfortable statement about Europe’s chronic tendency to underperform the United States in economic growth.” Hmmm, […]

At this point people are still combing through the fine print of Senator Dodd’s financial reform bill to determine all its ramifications, however one point is very clear in assessing the independence of the new Consumer Financial Products Protection Agency. The Fed will have control over the agency’s budget. This means that if the Fed […]

The Post article on the Fed’s monthly industrial production report told readers that “February’s numbers gave economists other signs that manufacturing would continue to recover this spring, as the capacity utilization — portion of plants used for production — climbed to 72.7 percent from 72.5 percent.” Umm no, that’s not quite right. Overall industrial production […]

The projections from the Fed, the Congressional Budget Office and the Obama administration all show the unemployment rate remaining unusually high for years into the future. This may cause listeners to wonder how the pessimistic view of employment growth from Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Economic Policy Institute (my former boss), became the “dissenting […]

Okay, it’s not exactly a pension fund, it’s the Social Security trust fund that is cashing in some of the government bonds that it holds to pay benefits. This is the way the trust fund was designed to work, but AP somehow cannot find a reporter (or editor) who understands even the most basic facts […]

The NYT told readers that: “China is the biggest buyer of Treasury bonds at a time when the United States has record budget deficits and needs China to keep buying those bonds to finance American debt.” Nope, this is nonsense. People can get the real story from today’s Krugman column, China has an unloaded water […]

Paul Krugman is absolutely right in describing the economic relationship between the U.S. and China; the United States has nothing to fear from a decision by China to stop buying U.S. government debt. However, the discussion of the U.S-China relationship may not be quite right. Krugman has the United States meekly asking China to raise […]

Japan is an extremely densely populated country. Because of its low birth rate and immigration rate, it is likely to become less crowded in the future. While most normal people would probably consider this a positive development, the Washington Post ran an Outlook piece expressing horror at this prospect. The headline tells readers that: “even […]

That is what readers could infer from Jackie Calmes’ blognote in which she listed Social Security alongside Medicare and Medicaid as “fast-growing entitlement benefit program.” Social Security is projected to grow at a 5.3 percent annual rate over the next decade, only slightly faster than the 4.4 percent projected growth rate of nominal GDP over […]

The media reported on a 0.3 percent rise in retail sales in February, which was described as a surprisingly strong result compared with the consensus expectation of a 0.2 percent decline. However, the news was not as good as this may appear, since January’s sales data was revised down by 0.4 percent. In other words, […]