21 Facts About Mark Weisbrot

Mark Weisbrot is co-director with Dean Baker of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC Weisbrot is President of Just Foreign Policy, a non-governmental organization dedicated to reforming United States foreign policy.

Mark Weisbrot has been described as the "intellectual architect" behind the unsuccessful Bank of the South, a joint project by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Ecuador, Bolivia and Venezuela which was spearheaded by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez.

Mark Weisbrot criticized the role played by the IMF while taking an active role in promoting the bank, describing the Bank of the South as "another Declaration of Independence for South America" and that it was "Latin America casting off Washington's shackles".

Mark Weisbrot has written and co-authored research papers and articles on the economies and politics of Latin America and the Caribbean for the past two decades.

Mark Weisbrot has argued that, from 2003 to 2011, Brazil was successful in reducing poverty and inequality, and increasing GDP growth.

Mark Weisbrot attributed these successes in part to policy changes that were an improvement over the neoliberal program Brazil adopted in the 1980s.

Mark Weisbrot argued against the impeachment of former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff in 2016 and the corruption conviction of former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2018, pointing to a lack of precedent and evidence to justify the proceedings.

Mark Weisbrot was an advisor, and co-wrote with Tariq Ali the screenplay for the Oliver Stone's 2009 film, South of the Border, which examined the "pink tide" of elected leftist governments in South America.

Mark Weisbrot disagreed with Larry Rohter, the former South American bureau chief of The New York Times, over his statements on Venezuela, where Rohter said that in support of the film South of the Border, Mark Weisbrot, Tariq Ali, and Oliver Stone manipulated data to present a positive image of Hugo Chavez.

Mark Weisbrot contends that the Great Recession had more impact on EU countries than it did in the United States and that Europe was hit by a secondary recession when the US was not, due to Europe's lack of a sufficient monetary policy response, insistence on austerity measures, and the use of the crisis to advance a political agenda.

Mark Weisbrot makes the case that the EU and the European Monetary Union are ideologically different organizations, with the more conservative EMU subjecting low-income member countries to the same policies the IMF has imposed outside of Europe.

In 2011, Mark Weisbrot was critical of the Troika and the IMF, claiming that the former had placed constraints on the Greek economy that caused continual loss of GDP and that the IMF's demands for austerity would make recovery difficult.

Mark Weisbrot advocated for the restructuring of Greece's debt as a better path forward than imposing austerity measures.

Mark Weisbrot advocated for the position that the European Central Bank undertake quantitative easing, citing the success of the Federal Reserve's actions in the United States.

Mark Weisbrot predicted that an economic recovery in Greece would be accelerated if Greece abandoned the Euro to avoid punitive measure attached to EU loans, claiming that reducing government spending during recessionary periods is not an effective means of creating the economic growth necessary to end a recession.

Mark Weisbrot writes an economic and policy issues column that is distributed across the United States by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.

Mark Weisbrot is co-author, with Baker, of Social Security: The Phony Crisis.

Mark Weisbrot has made these arguments in various contexts over the years, for example on Greece, on Spain, and most recently, in The New York Times on the 2017 French presidential election.

Francisco Rodriguez, an economist of Wesleyan University accused Mark Weisbrot of being biased for praising Hugo Chavez's economic policies and stated that Mark Weisbrot's work had a "use of heavily slanted data".

Rohter says that Mark Weisbrot manipulated data to give a positive image of Hugo Chavez in the film South of the Border.

Mark Weisbrot defended his work saying that Rohter didn't find any inaccuracies and that Rohter "tried rather desperately" to find inaccuracies that no one would notice.