On Oct 1, 2008, at 4:38 PM, Jim Devine quoted Dean Baker:
Washington DC's Fox affiliate appears to have been taken over by Wall Street lobbyists. It has been reporting all sorts of unsubstantiated assertions that a credit squeeze is destroying the economy. You'd never know that typical 30-year mortgage is going for around 6.0 percent these days. Back when I last bought a home I had to pay 7.15 percent. But in Fox's sell the bailout campaign, there is no place for arithmetic.
The point isn't the price of credit right now, it's its availability. It is very hard to get a mortgage these days. The supply of mortgage credit outstanding from banks in September was down over 3% from a year earlier. In Dean's attempt to resist a bailout, is there a place for nonanecdotal data?
That sounds really bad -- the highest overnight borrowing cost in history. Maybe it would have been helpful to tell readers that this data has only been compiled since 2001, a period of unusually low interest rates.
Interbank lending rates have been very high, but again, it's not so much about price but availability. The interbank market has essentially frozen. If you're going to debunk the MSM, you should hold yourself to higher standards.
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