Synopses & Reviews
Despite reports that the recession may be over, the unemployment rate is more than ten percent and home foreclosures are at a record high. It’s no secret that the U.S. economy is in shambles because of the recent housing bubble. However, according to Dean Baker, Co-Director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the people who looked the other way as the eight trillion dollar housing bubble grew unchecked are trying to rewrite history by downplaying the impact of the bubble. In Baker’s new book, False Profits: Recovering from the Bubble Economy, he recounts the strategies used by the country’s top economic policymakers to keep the American public unaware of their failure to recognize the housing bubble and to take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings for tens of millions of people.
Review
TruthOut.com, Book Review by Leslie Thatcher, 2/10/10
The delicious double-entendre of Dean Baker's most recent title is enhanced by the book's cover photo of a trio of false prophets, Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan and Henry (Hank) Paulson, all of whom are thoroughly excoriated within the book's pages for their responsibility in feeding, prolonging, misdiagnosing and incorrectly responding to the 2007-2009 financial meltdown and the associated economic collapse. However, the book also chronicles the loss of $8 trillion of housing "wealth," $1.4 trillion in annual demand, whatever financial security the vast majority of baby-boomers ever had, "increases" in homeownership rates and any other widespread economic gains associated to the post-2000 period. Truthout has published Dean Baker's columns about net ob losses for 2000 - 2010, a decade that also saw a 26 percent drop in the stock market, the elimination of the $236 billion federal budget surplus President Bush inherited and its transformation into a record deficit and the overall deliquescence of any societal and most people's personal economic "profits."
While most of us find ourselves economically worse off after the last ten years, some have done extremely well and most of those who bear the burden of responsibility for the American economic catastrophe have suffered no consequences whatsoever: financial, social or professional. Writing about Bernanke specifically, Baker's remarks are equally apposite to other titans of finance, central banking and the financial regulatory regimes:
It would difficult to imagine someone with a comparable record of disastrous failures being allowed to remain in most jobs. Would a nurse who routinely administers the wrong medicine and causes his patients to die be allowed to keep his job? Would a bank teller who leaves the cash drawer open remain in her position? How about the school bus driver who comes drunk to work?
In most lines of work, a certain level of competence is expected. Unfortunately, this is not the case for those who set US economic policy. [1]
Baker places the burden of blame on regulators and the political establishment because they utterly perverted their mission:
Progressives do conservatives' bidding when we denounce them as "market fundamentalists." We should, instead, be exposing their use of government to set up structures that ensure the market works to benefit the wealthy. We could then bring our policies into focus as those designed to ensure that market outcomes will benefit the bulk of the population.
The market is just a tool, like a wheel or a hammer. It would be bad politics and bad policy for progressives to make a big scene attacking the wheel. It is similarly bad politics and bad policy to put these attacks on the market at the center of a political agenda. [2]
Baker never attacks the wheel; instead he demonstrates how it was deliberately allowed to run wild. As Baker himself warned as early as summer 2002, all indicators pointed to the rise in housing prices as a classic bubble, divorced from any tether in reality, yet the regulators, media and most mainstream economists kept pumping hot air into that bubble. Further, Dean Baker exposes the pathetic excuses that the regulators did not have the necessary tools to put on the brakes for the self-serving and specious rationalizations they are. [3] Ever debunking the myth that somehow it was the "free" market at work, he relentlessly exposes how regulation, regulatory bodies and the public officials charged with supervising the financial industry have used their power to favor a narrow swathe of private interests over the public good. And, as always, Baker highlights what alternatives were and are available to turn that equation around. Baker's relentless exposé of what is actually subsidized and who profits from specific policies, how wealth is transferred and how all this activity is disguised fuels his narrative with "true prophet" power.
"False Profits" combines impeccable scholarship - assembling an array of relevant facts and data totally accessible to non-economists - with Baker's acerbic, but unforced, wit and verve. His iconoclasm constantly renews its sources and consistently targets those "false prophets" in all sectors who contribute to misleading the American people. Baker is the journalists' economist, the reality-based economist: whatever other case he may be making, he invariably demonstrates why correct and timely information and clear understanding are essential to economic problem-solving, as well as how "fudges" harm everyone.
The book's structure begins by a backward look, an analysis of precisely how we reached the present situation and what our present situation actually is (in chapters, "Economic Collapse: It Is Their Fault," "Surveying the Damage" and "The Terrible Tale of the TARP"), then pivots on an exposition of why correct diagnosis and analysis are so crucial ("Will They Ever Discover the Housing Bubble?"), develops the case he has presented with three chapters of prescription ("Stimulus: It Is Just Spending," "Real Stimulus: Programs to Boost the Economy" and "Reforming the Financial System") and concludes with a resounding final call for accountability ("Remember the Housing Bubble").
Unfortunately, recent events - the absence of any effective policy to slow down foreclosures; the most probably ineffective and unquestionably inadequate stimulus measures in the just-presented budget; financial services regulatory proposals that do not address the causes for regulatory failure - suggest that the present administration is only slightly more willing to learn from Dean Baker's acute analyses than was its predecessor. And Ben Bernanke's reconfirmation as Fed chairman is just the most recent and flagrant sign that the administration has no intention of investigating, let alone punishing, the regulatory - and individual regulators' - blunders that led to the present pass.
Economics is a science of human behavior. It rests on the observation that people respond to incentives. Consequently, Baker's apparently political argument that there must be consequences for the failures of judgment and action that resulted in the economic meltdown is a quintessentially economic one. With no disincentives for failure and the ever-present incentives for complicity offered by the industry that has captured them, regulators will continue to fail the whipping boy who pays for their transgressions - us.
Synopsis
Building on the author’s expertise, False Profits recounts the causes of the economic meltdown, dissects the government’s inadequate responses to it, and offers a thoughtful progressive program for rebuilding the economy and reforming the financial system.
Synopsis
Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recounts the strategies used by the country's top economic policymakers to conceal their failure to recognize the housing bubble or take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings of tens of millions of people. He quashes dire warnings of looming rampant inflation and spiraling debt with solid historic evidence to the contrary--evidence that supports more stimulus, not less. He reveals the evolving role of the U.S. dollar in today's global economy and lays down cogent arguments about why the dollar will fall in value. With a dose of optimism, Baker outlines a thoughtful progressive program for rebuilding the economy and reshaping the financial system, including new financial transaction taxes that will reduce or eliminate economic waste while providing stimulus and incentives where and when they are most needed.
About the Author
Dean Baker has more than 25 years of research experience in occupational and environmental epidemiology. The primary emphasis of his research has been on community-based epidemiological studies. During the past several years, he has focused on developmental toxicity and children's environmental
health. He has conducted several epidemiological research studies examining chronic health effects of gestational and early childhood exposure to heavy metals and organochlorine chemicals. His other area of research has been on the health effects of psychosocial stressors in the workplace and in
communities exposed to environmental hazards. In both of these areas, Dr. Baker has made contributions to the epidemiological study design and methods. He was elected 3 times as Secretary-Treasurer of the International Society for Environmental Epidemiology, and was a founding member. He is an
active teacher at the university, directing an occupational medicine residency program and supervising graduate students. Mark J Nieuwenhuijsen has been involved in various environmental exposure assessment, epidemiology, and health risk assessment studies in the Netherlands, the UK, Eastern Europe
and the US. His interests include the health effects of chlorination by-products in water, traffic related air pollution and metals, specifically in relation to reproductive, respiratory, renal and cancer effects. He has published over a hundred papers. He graduated from Wageningen University, the
Netherlands, and went to do a PhD at the National Heart and Lung Institute in London, UK. For his post doc he went to the University of California, Davis, USA after which he took up a faculty position atImperial College London, UK. In January 2007 he joined the Center for Research in Environmental
Epidemiology (CREAL) in Barcelona, Spain as a Research Professor. He is associate editor on the journals 'Occupational and Environmental Medicine' and the 'Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology'.