"Mark Weisbrot" is an United States/American economist, columnist and co-director, with Dean Baker, of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) in Washington, D.C. As a commentator, he contributes to publications such as New York Times, the UK's The Guardian, and Brazil's largest newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo.

As an economist, Weisbrot has opposed privatization of the Social Security (United States)/United States Social Security system and has been critical of globalization and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). He has supported efforts by South American governments to create a Bank of the South, in order to make them more independent of the IMF. Weisbrot's work on Latin American countries (including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador and Venezuela) has attracted national and international attention, and in 2008 was cited by Brazilian Foreign Secretary Celso Amorim. In early 2010 Weisbrot's work on Latvia's 2008–2009 Latvian financial crisis/economic crisis attracted national and international attention.

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Payroll tax no longer captures as much income of wage earners as it did 20 years ago.

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The main problem is that Washington is in denial about the economic failure, ... More Latin American leaders are aware of it, but it does not seem to be discussed. What is needed at a bare minimum is some discussion about what has gone wrong.

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I don't think Bush would have gone down there if he knew he'd run into this kind of opposition, ... The FTAA may not be completely dead, but it's close to dead — and the body's twitching.

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We have had a 30-year period in which the real median wage has grown 9%, while productivity is up 80%. Almost none of that improvement has gone to the majority of the labor force.

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There's nothing the government's been doing that's remotely unsustainable.

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It is a long-term trend. Over the past 30 years, the median wage has grown about 9 or 10 percent.

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