Events during this financial crisis have repeatedly displayed a degree of disrespect for various pundits’ authority; every so often another pulpit is toppled. So spare a thought for the pundits, the most unmourned of crisis casualties. One skips through the roll of slight miscues (“Lehman repo looks solid”, April ’08), shame (“believe Fuld, Lehman bears […]
Read more...I claimed the other day, from memory, that the Landesbanken plus Deutsche had dumped EUR35Bn in the Iceland crash. That’s a spectacular claim, but unfortunately not at all true. A bit of polite throatclearing from commenter Hubert got me to dig through the bankruptcy wind-ups of Kaupthing, Glitnir and Landsbanki. Based on a wikileak of […]
Read more...By Douglas K. Smith, Executive Director of The Punch Sulberger Program at Columbia School of Journalism Words matter. Or, more to the point, the meaning of words matter. Take ‘unemployment’. Notwithstanding years of persistently pointing out that which is the Bureau of Labor Statistics U3 series, severely understates real unemployment, nearly all accounts, whether in […]
Read more...No formal announcement yet, but some presumably well-sourced rumours about the size of the Irish bailout (EUR 85Bn), and the rate (7%, via the redoubtable Twitterer on all matters Irish @LorcanRK). While we await the budget statement, there are reasons to suspect, or hope, that the bailout, like Godot, will never come, because it’s failing […]
Read more...Some geographical and economic clarifications from politicians, officials and commentators: 1. Spain is not Greece – Elena Salgado, Spanish Finance Minister, ~February, 2010. 2. Portugal is not Greece – The Economist, 22nd April, 2010. 3. Greece is not Ireland – George Papaconstantinou, Greek Finance Minister, 8th November 2010. 4. Spain is neither Ireland nor Portugal […]
Read more...One of the annoying and persistent Big Lies of the financial crisis is that the rescues were a really good thing because they saved the world as we know it. That argument is dubious for a host of reasons: the world as we know it is the very same one that went off a cliff, […]
Read more...On the eve of Senate Banking Committee hearings into mortgage securitizations and the release of a Congressional Oversight Panel report covering the same terrain, the mortgage securitization industry has a full bore pushback underway. A story in the New York Times bears all the hallmarks of being a PR plant. Remember the sympathetic New York […]
Read more...As an article in today’s New York Times makes clear, Robert Shiller has joined a group of behavioral economists that is advocating the use of propaganda and the sublter forms of manipulation of the public that Walter Lippmann famously called “the manufacture of consent.” In one sense, this ugly development is coming full circle. Lippmann […]
Read more...Various commenters have noticed that Mish’s blog has vanished. My guess – a spurious “terms of service violation”. Google’s robot spam monitors sometimes screw up by giving false positives – something like this happened to Yves (see para 3) back when NC was on Blogger. I can’t imagine they’ll shut up Mish for long and […]
Read more...Dunno if you guys in the US are up to speed on the Twitter joke trial, a classic collision of new technology, post 9/11 paranoia, witless judges, and a hapless victim. Here’s one of our leading comedy scriptwriters on the warpath back in May. The conviction was upheld on appeal! Here’s a geek carefully setting […]
Read more...Marshall Auerback, who lived in Japan during its early post bubble years, sent this e-mail: Today’s New York Times reports on how the Saudis warned the US about the planned parcel bomb attack emanating from Yemen. Buried in the story was this line: “The German magazine Der Spiegel told The New York Times it would […]
Read more...In Rudy Giuliani’s second term as mayor, the famed backer of law n’ order had a great fondness for taking it into his own hands. Groups that wanted to assemble on the steps of City Hall were required to file a notice or petition of some sort. A peculiar ritual would then ensue. The mayor’s […]
Read more...This interview of Maria Bartiromo, of her new book, The Weekend That Changed Wall Street, was taped back in September. Some readers may deem it to be a bit softball, but a book TV program isn’t a format that lends itself to pointed questions. In fact, I found the experience a bit like what I […]
Read more...It take a fair degree of skill to pen a journalistic story that hews to the appearance of objectivity yet is out to sell a point of view. The lead article in the Journal tonight, “Niche Lawyers Spawned Housing Fracas” telegraphs its bias in its headline: the foreclosure crisis is merely the creation of two […]
Read more...We’ll see next week whether two articles, one in the Wall Street Journal, the other in the New York Times, are a sign of a sea change in the media posture towards the banking industry’s spin efforts, at least as far as the securitization mess is concerned. Let’s face it, the banks have lied so […]
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