Recent quotes:

Morning Must-Read: Dean Baker: The Housing Bubble and the Financial Crisis #25,452 - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

If we look at the economy after the financial markets had stabilized (2011 or 2012, pick your year) and ask what component of GDP would be higher if we did not have the financial crisis… …it’s hard to see a candidate. Brad’s pick of non-residential investment doesn’t hold water. Perhaps we can claim a bit better picture on net exports if people had not turned to the dollar as a safe haven, but this involved many factors other than the financial crisis. Also, the conscious decision of foreign cental banks to prop up the dollar to sustain their export markets has to swamp this effect. I stand by my housing bubble assessment.
#Dean-Baker - equitablegrowth.org

The Housing Bubble and the Lesser Depression: Either the Very Sharp Dean Baker or I Am Hopelessly Confused - Washington Center for Equitable Growth

it was the financial crisis–not the collapse of the housing bubble–that led to the final tranche of the decline in construction, and to the catastrophic collapses in business investment and exports in 2008: And slow recovery since has been the product of three factors since: The inability given low inflation of the Federal Reserve to push interest rates low enough to attain the financial crisis-depressed Wicksellian natural rate of interest. The extraordinary fiscal austerity since the start of 2010. The failure to reorganize the broken housing finance channel and thus restore residential construction to some semblance of normality. Indeed, even with the zero lower bound on interest rates constraining monetary policy, we would probably have had a satisfactory recovery were it not for fiscal austerity and the failure to clear the clogged housing-finance channel. The business-investment and exports recoveries have been impressive: None of the catastrophe we have suffered and continue to suffer was baked in the cake by the housing bubble.
#Dean-Baker - equitablegrowth.org

Dean Baker on the TPP: Super-Early Monday DeLong Smackdown Watch (Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality...)

In order to get more losers than winners in the U.S., you have to argue that globalization caused not just the fall of manufacturing but the success of the war on unions, the rise of the Overclass, and the hypertrophy of finance. All of those look to me like processes largely (but not completely) independent of globalization. And I do not see why the presumption should be looking forward that this next step of globalization will be bad. All that being said, I find myself extremely frustrated that Obama is not, say, demanding that Congress passes the one-sentence fix to ObamaCare needed to protect it from the King v. Burwell lawsuit before he will sign the TPP implementing legislation. And I may well turn on a dime when I actually get to see and when we get to cost out the implications of the IP provisions of the TPP.
#Dean-Baker #Trans-Pacific-Partnership - bradford-delong.com