NPR Still Doesn't Know Why the Economy Is Tanking

from The American Prospect's Beat the Press:



NPR Still Doesn't Know Why the Economy Is Tanking

Remember way back last summer when Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and other prominent economists assured us that the problems in the subprime mortgage market could not possibly lead us into a recession because the market was too small to have that much impact?

They were right. The subprime market, by itself, is too small to lead the U.S. economy into a recession. On the other hand, the collapse of the $20 trillion U.S. housing market is plenty large enough to lead the U.S. economy into a recession. It is the latter that is the source of the economy's current problem, not the subprime sideshow.

NPR apparently still has not gotten word of this fact. This morning it did a piece where it referred to the subprime crisis as the cause of U.S. economic problems. Hopefully, its reporters will soon catch on to the nature of the problems in the U.S. economy or at least find some economists who can explain the situation to their listeners.

--Dean Baker

Posted by Dean Baker on January 23, 2008 5:19 AM


http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/beat_the_press_archive?month=01&year=2008&base_name=npr_still_doesnt_know_why_the

.... No wonder we've become an international joke.

and this too:

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/1/23/recession

Economics Journalist Robert Kuttner on the “Most Serious Financial Crisis Since the Great Depression”: “This is the Result of Rightwing Ideology and the Political Power of Wall Street”


Rightwing Ideology is correct.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=389&topic_id=2746690&mesg_id=2746690

I think there are a lot of very complex factors that drive the global economy and no single reason has more weight than the combined weight of the whole.

Peace.

Everyone knows that. :eyes:

Started when the Pug Congress went after their funding.

It's tanking because of the pointless war spending
It's tanking because of 7 years of deficit spending
It's tanking because of the ending of progressive income tax hurt the majority of Americans
It's tanking because the federal governments in ability to regulate
It's tanking because nothing W has done is the type of things that lead to a good economy. What's shocking isn't the recession but how terrible the growth was in between the two Bush recessions. Most Americans saw themselves lose ground during the "growth" period, that's why they're so scared of this coming recession.

When the Republican elite finally own everything, where will they find customers?

You can't help but notice 'em now in virtually every neighborhood. No drapes and an eerily dead look. These are properties that sit and drain someone's pocketbook...not just paying the property taxes, but also electric to keep the house from molding away and landscaping...also other incidental expenses that add to the misery...millions more spent rather than collected every month.

The Village still thinks this is some sports contest...rambling off numbers and speaking to "analyists" like this is some spectator sport. It's not...and it won't be until they're faced with their own hardships.

This is the logical extension and inevitable result of a media full of only people who are so rich, that their sources of income, investments, kinds of taxation, etc., are totally unlike the majority's, and therefore never touch the kind of society almost everyone is living in, (the type that "worries" about "waitresses making $50,000-$75,000 a year," for example, so clueless as to what people even make). They act as if the entire economy were "the markets," and the solution is "opening markets"; rising unemployment--to the extent that they even admit it--is not bad, but good, as that lowers overhead and reduces management's costs; and all of these crises have been referred to only as they affect "investors" and "market confidence." Every single one of these crises, from the credit card record debt, to the mortgage and sub-prime loan scandals, have been treated as "industries," and problems with the profits of individual corporations; no one has referred at all to the increasing debt and losses of the people of the country. When the entire media started treating economic issues as if they were all "experts" and "markets," and management only, and "investments," and cut out the total subject matter of people and unemployment and inflation, price-gouging and debt, then they lost their own ability to even find most of the topic anymore. Economics is only a mathematical subject to these people; the tragedy is that it is societal.