Dean Baker Quotations

First of all, it's very expensive to administer private accounts, especially if you let people manage these accounts themselves, ... Bush is vague on how he would set it up and make it work.

Does he want to see it burst on its own, or is it appropriate for the Fed to move to deflate asset bubbles?

Clearly, housing is going to be a drag on the economy; the question is how much does housing slow and how quickly.

It does pull a lot of money out of people's pockets. Even if it doesn't go back up much, it translates to a 50-to-60-cents-a-gallon gas tax. But for the borrowing that people were willing to do, it probably would have led to recession.

I've always thought you'll have the movement in price before you'll see it on quantity side, ... As long as the price remains high, if you're a builder, you want to get the houses up in order to cash in.

People are really stretched. They are banking on everything turning out right for them. That they won't lose their jobs, that they won't run into unexpected expenses. They're betting that the housing market will continue to appreciate.

People are always trying to explain the lack of questions as saying there's a consensus around monetary policy, but there's anything but a consensus on monetary policy. What upsets me more than anything is no one is asking serious questions.

When you see it increasing quarter after quarter, there seems to be something going on here. We're building more homes than are being filled.

Home and rental prices will come back together by home prices falling. I don't think landlords will be in any position to raise rates too much.

In terms of people's lives, let's say someone had a reasonably good job in the tourism industry, they're not going to wait around a year and half or two years for their job to come back. What's there when it (the Gulf economy) comes back might be qualitatively different than what it was before.