Déjà vu anyone? The financial press is confessing to their complete miss of the financial crisis.
Doesn't this sound all too familiar, like the reporting leading up to the Iraq war?
All journalists out there, perhaps it's time to stop reading corporate press kits, interviewing CEOs, being dazzled by power and money and doing your homework from first principles.
As a blogger we all know just how easy it is to rewrite press kits and post them as stories. Turns out that is what you reported on, fiction. Economic fiction.
What is more amusing, while financial journalists admit their failure and show acts of contrition, they are doing the same damn behavior right now.
Yesterday (I won't link to it), I saw a Wall Street Journal article literally claim that immigrants are more productive than Americans, which is a current corporate motif being sung to obtain more guest worker Visas and more global labor arbitrage tools. Now anyone in their right mind believe, from first principles that one subgroup of people is superior to another?
I think I noted this last
I think I noted this last year. We have not been served well by this part of the profession...not enough rigorous analysis, and too much Maria Bartaromo glitz. Mezmerized by the glamour of the super-rich, financial journalists failed miserably and they and their editors/producers should be ashamed at the fact that they've become little more than shills and hacks. They were afraid to pull up the skirt and take a cold hard look. They were out of touch with the man on the street. A case of insider trading, really.