Dean Baker's Blog, page 48

Is the Washington Post Selling Headlines to Mark Zuckerberg?

That is undoubtedly what readers are asking after seeing the headline, "Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg struggles to balance truth and free speech." The headline is for the recording of a remarkable uncritical interview of Zuckerberg.

In the interview, Zuckerberg presents himself as struggling to deal with the trade-off between banning ads that are untrue and allowing free speech. If a reporter had been conducting the interview, they would have pointed out that every newspaper in the country faces the same problem an...

Are Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook Too Incompetent to Do What Publishers of Small Town Papers Do?

That seemed to be what Zuckerberg was saying in an interview with the Washington Post. Zuckerberg responding to complaints that Facebook was allowing peope to lie in political ads:

"'People worry, and I worry deeply, too, about an erosion of truth,' Zuckerberg told The Washington Post ahead of a speech Thursday at Georgetown University. 'At the same time, I don’t think people want to live in a world where you can only say things that tech companies decide are 100 percent true. And I think that those tensi...

Fact Check: Warren Right, AP Fact Checkers Wrong, Economists Who Know the Data Blame Trade for Loss of Manufacturing Jobs

It is amazing how reporters and many economists feel the need to deceive the public about the reason for the loss of manufacturing jobs in the last decade. The number of manufacturing jobs was little changed from 1970 to 2000. From 2000 to the end of 2007 (before the Great Recession) we lost 3.4 milllion manufacturing jobs as the trade deficit exploded.

Fans of logic and arithmetic might think there is a connenction there, the AP's Fact Checker apparently does not. It tells readers:

"On trade

ELIZABETH WARREN: “The dat...

The Economics and Politics of Financial Transactions Taxes and Wealth Taxes

(This piece first appeared on my Patreon page.)

Last month, the Washington Post reported that Joe Biden is considering including a financial transactions tax (FTT) as part of his campaign for the Democratic nomination. For those of us who have long advocated such a tax, this is very good news.

On this issue, Bernie Sanders has taken the lead among presidential candidates, including an FTT as part of his plan for free college tuition free. Several other candidates also support an FTT, but if t...

Those Quaint Corporate Scandals in Japan

I was struck by a New York Times article on the disruptions within the corporate hierarchy at Nissan, the huge Japanese automaker. The article begins:

"An outside law firm investigating problems at Nissan, the troubled Japanese automaker, this summer discovered some potentially explosive information.

"Hari Nada, a powerful Nissan insider who was behind the ouster last year of Nissan’s chairman, Carlos Ghosn, over compensation issues, had been improperly overpaid himself, the firm found. A sec...

Quick Note on Protections for Facebook and Other Internet Intermediaries

The NYT had a piece on U.S. Internet regulations, and efforts to apply them to other countries, that may have left some readers confused. The piece focused on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects Internet intermediaries from many of the liabilities faced by conventional publishers.

Perhaps the most important one of these liabilities is exposure to libel law. In the case of standard publishers, if a publisher helps to spread a third party's libelous claim, then they ca...

Quck Note on Protections for Facebook and Other Internet Intermediaries

The NYT had a piece on U.S. Internet regulations, and efforts to apply them to other countries, that may have left some readers confused. The piece focused on Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects Internet intermediaries from many of the liabilities faced by conventional publishers.

Perhaps the most important one of these liabilities is exposure to libel law. In the case of standard publishers, if a publisher helps to spread a third party's libelous claim, then they ca...

Donald Trump’s Trade War: Report from the Front

Donald Trump is bravely carrying on a trade war, not just with the bad guys with China, but with longtime allies like Canada and the European Union. Incredibly, the media just don’t seem that interested in reporting on the ongoing progress.

Last week the Commerce Department released trade data for August, and it got almost no attention whatsoever. The report showed that the trade deficit increased modestly from $54.0 billion in July to $54.9 billion in August. This is virtually identical to t...

There Was a Solution to the Corruption of Bond Rating Agencies: Timothy Geithner Killed It

The Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy piece on how bond rating agencies are again giving inflated ratings, in this case to collaterized loan obligations that include tranches of a variety of bonds and loans. Inflated ratings was a major problem in the housing bubble years, with the major rating agencies giving investment grade ratings to mortgage backed securities that were filled with subprime mortgages.

The piece notes the basic incentive problem that the issuer pays the rating agency. This...

Japan's Government Will Soon Make a Profit on Its Huge Debt

The NYT neglected to mention this fact in this piece talking about Japan's economy. While the piece noted that Japan's debt to GDP ratio is close to 250 percent, the highest for any wealthy country, it didn't point out that the debt service burden is virtually zero.

In fact, because much of Japan's debt carries a negative nominal interest rate, the I.M.F. projects that its burden will actually be negative as of 2021. This means that people will on net be paying Japan to lend it money, so that...