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Dean Baker (born July 13, 1958) is an American macroeconomist who co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) with Mark Weisbrot. Baker has been credited as one of the first economists to have identified the 2007–08 United States housing bubble.
In 1999, Baker and Weisbrot co-founded the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR), a US independent, nonpartisan think tank that produces economic research on US national affairs (social security, healthcare, the US national budget), and international topics (the global economy, the International Monetary Fund or Latin America policy). In that same year Baker was a senior research fellow at the Preamble Center for Public Policy.
Baker has consulted with officials from the World Bank and provided testimony to the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress and to the OECD's Trade Union Advisory Council.
From 1996 to 2006, Baker was the author of a weekly online commentary on the economic reporting of The New York Times and The Washington Post,Dean Baker, CEPR, 9 June 2003, Reflections on Economic Reporting: Seven Years of the Economic Reporting Review the Economic Reporting Review. Since 2006, he has continued this commentary on his blog Beat The Press, formerly published at The American Prospect and now on CEPR's website.
Baker won the Revere Award, along with Steve Keen and Nouriel Roubini, for predicting the crash of the United States housing bubble and the resulting recession, which occurred from 2007 to 2008. He warned about the coming crisis and the related government policies in multiple articles, op-eds and interviews from 2002 to 2005. Basing his outlook on housing price data sets produced by the U.S. government, Baker asserted that there was a bubble in the US housing market in August 2002, well before its peak, (2026). 9780691142166, Princeton University Press. ISBN 9780691142166 and predicted that the bubble's collapse would lead to recession. His prediction for when the recession would start was off by only one fiscal quarter.
Regarding the housing bubble, Baker was critical of Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan. He has also been critical of the regulatory framework of the real estate and financial industries, the use of financial instruments like collateralized debt obligation, and U.S. politicians and regulators' performance and conflicts of interest.
Baker opposed the U.S. government bailout of Wall Street banks on the basis that the only people who stood to lose from their collapse were their shareholders and high-income CEOs. Of any hypothetical negative effects of not extending the bailout, he said, "We know how to keep the financial system operating even as banks go into bankruptcy and receivership," Beat The Press , March 9, 2008 citing U.S. government action taken during the S&L crisis of the 1980s. William Seidman, Who Led Cleanup of S&L Crisis, Dies, Bloomberg, May 13, 2009 He has ridiculed the U.S. elite for favoring it, asking, "How do you make a DC intellectual look less articulate than Sarah Palin being interviewed by Katie Couric? That's easy. You ask them how failure to pass the bailout will give us a Great Depression." Huffington Post, September 30, 2008
| full-employment | $1,115 | $2,300 | 56% | 62% | 6.0% | 12.3% |
| financial sector waste | $460 | $636 | 23% | 17% | 2.5% | 3.4% |
| patent/copyright monopolies | $217 | $434 | 11% | 12% | 1.2% | 2.3% |
| corporate governance | $90 | $145 | 5% | 4% | 0.5% | 0.8% |
| protecting highly paid professions | $100 | $200 | 5% | 5% | 0.5% | 1.1% |
In Rigged, Baker argues that, for example, focusing more on decreasing unemployment and less on minimizing inflation would primarily benefit the bottom 99%, though the top 1% would get some of those gains. Similarly, Baker says that changes in patent and copyright law over the past 50 years have violated their purpose under the Copyright Clause of the Constitution: "To promote the progress of science and the useful arts". He concludes that if the U.S. had spent the same amount on research and media with the results being placed in the public domain, everyone would be better off, with the possible exception of the ultra-wealthy. In particular, the world would be healthier not having to pay patent royalties to U.S. pharmaceutical companies.
He also writes that so-called free-trade agreements have exempted doctors and other highly paid professionals, not because of any intrinsic difference in what they do, but because they have more political power than organized labor.
Baker endorsed Elizabeth Warren's 2020 presidential campaign.
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