Dean Baker's Blog, page 193

Differences Between Greece and Japan: Japan Borrows in a Currency It Prints

In an article on the decision by Japan's Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe, to delay a long scheduled increase in its sales tax, the NYT told readers:

"Its [Japan's] debt may be large, but it is almost entirely funded by domestic savers, making a crisis like the one in Greece much less likely."

While it is true that most Japanese debt is held domestically, an even more important difference is that Japan's debt is almost entirely in yen. This means that Japan can never be in the situation Greece fa...

NYT News Section Is All In for the TPP

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) must be in deep trouble. The NYT has apparently abandoned any pretext of objectivity in covering the trade deal. The second paragraph of a news article on the political obstacles confronting the TPP equated the deal with "the cause of free and open trade." While that may be effective rhetoric for a pro-TPP politician, it has nothing to do with the reality of the deal.

The TPP actually does very little to advance free and open trade, primarily because the tr...

Stronger Copyright: NYT Neglects to Mention Cost of Protectionism

All NYT readers know that protectionism is stupid and self-defeating. It hurts everyone involved. So where were all the economic experts to give the usual lines on protectionism in response to efforts to change the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

The NYT reported on these efforts without ever once mentioning the economic costs that would be implied by making listeners pay more money for music and the cost that intermediaries like YouTube would have to incur to comply with stronger copyright...

Contrary to What You Read in the Washington Post, Core Inflation Has Not Ticked Up

The pressure for a Fed rate hike is building as consumer spending in April came in somewhat higher than expected. Other data remain mixed, with investment notably weak.

The Washington Post ran an article that seemed to support the rate hike agenda. It told readers that the Fed's key measure of inflation, the core personal consumption expenditure deflator, had ticked up in recent months. This is not true.

If we take the measure as being the year over year change, this was just 1.6 percent fro...

Will Hillary Clinton's Comments on Coal Hurt Senatorial Candidates in Ohio and Pennsylvania?

Before the West Virginia primary, former Secretary of States Hillary Clinton made a comment about how environmental regulations would lead to a loss of jobs in coal mining. The comment was in the context of a commitment to retraining miners and providing aid to hard-hit communities, but her critics have seized on it to say that she wants to get rid of coal mining jobs.

Emma Roller picked up on this theme in a NYT column on how the presidential election will affect candidates lower down on the...

Does the Fed Really Have Good News for the Middle Class?

Robert Samuelson says its does, using his column, "Good News for the Middle Class," to highlight the findings of the Fed's Report on the Economic Well-Being of U.S. Households in 2015. For Samuelson the big news is that 69percent of households said they were “living comfortably” or “doing okay,” up from 62 percent in 2013.

Okay, that one is clearly going in the right direction, although this is not terribly surprising given that we are two years further along in a recovery, which now has a re...

More Nonsense on China's Demography

It is amazing how often we hear that China is experiencing some sort of crisis because of its aging population. This is supposed to lead to a situation in which it won't have enough workers to support an aging population.

If folks have been following events in China recently its big problem is too few jobs and unemployment. It has closed a number of coal mines in recent years, leading to the loss of tens or even hundreds of thousands of jobs in the coal mining industry. Currently it is hugely...

Those Long TSA Lines: Take This Bag and Check It!

The NYT had an interesting column on how we can reduce the length of the security lines at airports. (Start with your shoes.) However, the piece left out one obvious factor lengthening security lines: carry on baggage.

Security lines would move much quicker if more people checked their luggage rather than carry it on board. Of course, there is a good reason that people want to carry their bags on board, most airlines charge them $25 per checked bag. (Southwest is a notable exception, allowing...

Robert Samuelson Wants the Fed to Raise Interest Rates and Throw People Out of Work

Yes, what else is new? The basic story is that Robert Samuelson has discovered a wage series that shows, "many workers are actually receiving modest increases." Samuelson tells readers:

"the study [the one showing modest wage growth] exerts pressure on the Fed to raise interest rates."

The series that has Samuelson so excited is a wage series that tracks the same workers over time. It looks at full-time workers and compares their wages this year with their wages last year. It will exclude any...

Is David Cameron's Austerity Three Times as Bad as Brexit?

That's the question millions are asking, or at least the one they should be asking. The OECD recently did an analysis of the economic consequences for the U.K. if it decides to leave the European Union. It concluded that it would cost the country 5.1 percent of GDP in its central estimate. Other analyses have arrived at similar estimates. Such estimates have been cited by right-thinking people everywhere as a powerful argument against the U.K. leaving the European Union. (It is.)

But Brexit i...