Dean Baker's Blog, page 513

Marketplace Radio Gets Economics of AT&T Merger Wrong

Marketplace Radio had a segment on the proposed merger of AT&T and T-Mobile. It reported that AT&T argued that the acquisition of T-Mobile would allow it to better serve consumers by giving it a large number of cell phone towers in areas where AT&T currently provides inadequate coverage. The segment then said that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) saw things differently. They blocked the merger because they argued it would lead to excessive concentration and higher prices for...

Robert Samuelson: "Bye Bye Darwin?"

Okay, Samuelson actually wants to say goodbye to Keynes, but he would have had a better case if he was talking about Darwin and the theory of evolution. After all, when we have seen nothing but confirming evidence for years, why should we still accept the theory?

Samuelson tells readers:

"The eclipse of Keynesian economics proceeds. When Keynes wrote "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in the mid-1930s, governments in most wealthy nations were relatively small and their...

Misleading Claims on the Keystone Pipeline: Brought to You By Our Friends at Washington Post

News outlets reserve the option to factcheck ads and will generally refuse to run an ad that is clearly false. This is apparently not the practice at the Washington Post (a.k.a "Fox on 15th Street).

The paper had a full page ad in the Sunday edition pushing the Keystone Pipeline. One of the claims in the add is that the unemployment rate among construction workers is 20 percent. If the Post had made the long trip over to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website it would have discovered...

You Don't Have to Save When Your House Does it For You

Adam Davidson had an amusing piece on the consumption of various items (e.g. lipstick, nail polish and men's underwear) that can be taken as reflecting consumers' sentiment. At one point he comments on the high levels of consumption of the last two decades and implied low levels of savings:

"During the fast growth of the late 1990s and mid-2000s, and the dark times that followed, people have been choosing to spend more and save less than ever before. Paradoxically, this happened just as...

Romer on Financial Crises: Getting Argentina Wrong

It is amazing how frequently people seem to ignore the data when they discuss the financial crisis in Argentina. In a generally solid column on financial crises and their aftermath in today's paper, Christina Romer tells readers that it took Argentina 8 years to recover its pre-crisis level of per capita GDP following its 2001 financial crisis.

This is clearly not true, if the reference is to the 2001 crisis. According to the IMF's data, real per capital GDP in Argentina exceeded its 2001...

How Did Fannie and Freddie Get to be the Symbols of the Housing Bubble?

In an article on addressing global warming would a serious newspaper throw in a comment to the effect that "many Americans consider it a hoax," without pointing out that it is not? It did the equivalent in an article on the Security and Exchange Commission's charges against the top executives at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for inaccurately representing their exposure to subprime debt.

The Post article at one point commented that:

"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which came to symbolize the...

The Naked Truth on Short-Selling

For some reason short-selling has a bad reputation in many circles. It is often blamed for bad things happening to good companies and/or good countries. The story among short-sellings critics is that it involves market manipulation, where big actors are attempting to profit by sending stocks or bonds plummeting.

Floyd Norris has a good column on short-selling in today's NYT. It sums up research on the issue which indicates that most of the time when companies are complaining about...

Quick, How Big a Deal Is $200 Billion Over the Next Quarter Century?

That's what NYT readers are asking themselves after the NYT told them that the oil and gas industry may spend up to $200 billion (in 2010 dollars) by 2035 on pipeline construction. While NYT readers are quite educated as a group, most probably do not have a clear idea of how much this spending would mean to the economy. It's a bit less than 0.05 percent of projected GDP over this period. That is not trivial, but it's not going to replace the auto industry (@ 4.0 percent of GDP).

Time Magazine Decides to Throw Numbers to the Wind to Promote Representative Ryan

Every budget expert knows that the stories of exploding budget deficits in the tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars (depends how many centuries in the future we wants to count), are driven by our broken health care system. If the United States paid the same amount per person for its health care as other wealthy countries, we would be looking at long-term budget surpluses not deficits. However, people who don't do budget calculations for a living do not generally know that the real story i...

How Does the Post Know that the Ryan-Wyden Plan Will "Preserve" Medicare?

Whether or not the premium support plan put forward by Representative Paul Ryan and Senator Ron Wyden would preserve what people understand as "Medicare" is a topic open to debate. Nonetheless the Post asserts that in both the headline and the first sentence of its article that the plan will preserve Medicare.

Of course the Post supports such premium support plans as it has repeatedly said on its editorial pages. However serious newspapers maintain a distinction between their editorial...