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There is no doubt that – apart from some smart writers like Liam Halligan – not many people in the financial journalist profession saw the current crisis coming or predicted its full extent. Clive Davis, over at his blog, makes that point by linking to an article that goes into what is rather mysteriously called the “shadow banking” sector: ie, any institution that gets involved in trading in or holding credit, such as hedge fund. I wrote about misconceptions surrounding this issue the other day.
So why were financial journalists or many economists unaware of the gathering storms? Well, assuming that they were oblivious, my explanations are as follows. I’d be interested in the comments. Here goes:
First, over-specialisation in the economics profession. One of the great benefits to me in discovering those Austrian economists such as Ludwig von Mises and writers like Henry Hazlitt all those years ago as a callow youth was that it reintroduced me to the days when “political economy”, as it was known in the 19th Century, was not hung up on mathematical models or big, wooly macro-economic systems, but addressed the incentives, laws, and actions of man. I had the benefit of getting a good grounding in microeconomics, in understanding an economy as a dynamic process that changes through time, not a set of artificial “games” with nonsense such as models of “perfect competition”.
Second, I think that for many journalists who did learn economics, the sort of ideas that have given me and other classical liberals/libertarians some insight into the gathering storms are simply not on their intellectual radar, or if they are, they are led to believe that people with surnames such as Hayek, or von Mises, or Friedman, are somehow eccentric, even malevolent creatures. Most of them have either read their JK Galbraiths, or their Krugmans, and get their views from the still-powerful tradition of Keynesian economics. The idea that fiat, state-monopoly money and Big Government – the two are related issues – lie at the core of the issue just does not apply to a group of folk who generally tilt left in their politics (although this is far less the case than in other parts of journalism, in my experience).
Also, as a result of overspecialisation, a journalist who writes about, say, the government bond market may not always join the dots when it comes to information coming out in a different area of the economy. There is also the fact that as sectoral journalists covering their beats such as energy, retail, telecoms, etc, get involved in the day-to-day job of covering these things, that the broader trends get obscured because of the sheer volume of stuff that journalists deal with. Given how financial journalism has developed as a profession in the last two decades – I have some insight into this via my day job – I am not too sure how to deal with this. Part of the trouble may even be what I might call the “showbiz” trend in financial journalism: reporters at channels such as CNBC often talk about the market in a sort of sports-coverage way: who’s up, who’s down, etc.
There are reporters – the FT’s Gillian Tett springs to mind – who have been very good at trying to keep on top of how the credit markets have evolved and some of the risks associated with that. And there are commentators and investors such as Jim Rogers, for instance, who have been pretty astute at seeing the disaster and warning about it. But a lot of people, as Clive Davis says, have not been aware of the magnitude of what has hit us. Maybe, however, Mr Davis has to remember the flip-side of this coin: we may now be blind to the chances of a pretty rapid recovery, at least in some parts of the world.
In its ironically titled ‘Lexington’ section the Economist magazine attacks those who point at the influence of collectivist ideologies on American government policy. Rather than refuting the evidence and argument the critics of government policy produce, the Economist (in the best education system and mainstream media tradition) just ignores evidence and argument, and denounces those who point to Marxist and Fascist origins of much modern “Progressive” government policy.
One example of the Economist approach really caught my eye:
For years Glenn Beck has denounced wild spending Republicans (especially President Bush) and since moving to Fox News he has continued to do this. He has also (with the help of many people who have written scholarly books on these matters) continued to try and explain the influence of collectivist philosophies on American politics over the last century – from Teddy Roosevelt to Barack Obama.
The Economist collapses all of this into – Glenn-Beck-claims-Obama-leading-the-United-States-to-Fascism.
If ‘Lexington’ was attacking me this would make some sort of sense, as I have often pointed out the Marxist background of Barack Obama (and Marxists sometimes evolve into Fascists – as this involves no rejection of their basic collectivism). However, Glenn Beck has clearly stated (many times) that he does not believe that that Barack Obama is a Communist or a Fascist – what Beck is trying to do is to show how collectivist philosophies have increasingly influenced American government policies over time, often without the leading politicians being fully aware of the origins and nature of the principles they try and put into practice.
Anyone who has seen the show, as opposed to tiny bits of the show taken out of context, would know this.
However, ‘Lexington’ would rather write about something without bothering to watch it – getting his “information” from the far left smear site “mediamatters” instead.
And the mainstream media wonder why libertarians and conservatives despise them.
Why we should shut these bastards down now and add TV Licensing to the unemployment figures.
The arrest. The outcome.
Raze White City to the ground and cast salt upon the earth…
Hat tip: Biased BBC
You probably missed it, because how the hell can anyone keep up with this stuff? But, I just happened to chance upon a couple of comments (numbers 269 and 276) on this at Guido’s, both of which had, copied and pasted into them, this:
Downing Street in ‘meltdown’
PRWeek – David Singleton 15-Apr-09
Downing Street was this week in ‘meltdown’ as Gordon Brown’s inner circle attempted to limit the fallout from the Damian McBride scandal.
Well-placed sources told PRWeek there was mounting fear in the heart of Downing Street that fresh revelations about senior MPs could emerge over the next few weeks and months leading up to the general election.
Brown’s close lieutenants such as Ed Balls, Tom Watson and Ian Austin are all believed to be vulnerable. It is feared fresh stories could be revealed by the handful of journalists who were fed negative stories by the Brown camp – or as a result of further emails that were sent to Labour blogger Derek Draper being made public.
One Downing Street insider said there had been ‘endless conference calls and crisis meetings’ since the story of McBride’s plans to smear senior Tories broke on Saturday.
The source added: ‘This is a full on disaster for Gordon – Downing Street is in meltdown. But it is more of a problem for Brown’s inner circle than it is for the Government more broadly.
‘The great fear of Brownites is that all of their activities over many years are suddenly now at risk of spilling out. It is an open secret that Gordon’s operation has been carrying out character assassinations, leaking documents and briefing against ministers and so on, but nobody has ever caught them red handed – until now. Now they have been caught out, it becomes legitimate to talk about all the other occasions.
‘It is a bit like getting Al Capone on his tax returns; it is actually one relatively minor misdemeanour – by no means are those emails the worst thing that Brown’s operation has ever done.’
Another source with close links to Downing Street said the PM’s defence was looking increasingly fragile: ‘Brown has had to stake his defence on this being a rogue operation, a single aberration that nobody else knew anything about.
‘The worry is that someone will produce evidence that it went much wider than this handful of emails and it went much wider than McBride.’
Which they will, because it did.
In short, matters are developing exactly as I told you they would in this posting. Brown’s ludicrous claim not to believe in dirty tricks has turned this from a few dogs chasing a small smear of dirt (The Emails and who knew what about them and whether anyone had tried to spread the particular smears in them) into a thousand dogs swimming happily in a quarter of a century of liquified shit, and now, too late, Downing Street realises it. But, like I say, it’s too late.
These people are smart enough to realise the terminal mess they are now in. Good. Nobody is smart enough to extricate them from it. Good again.
Classic:
“I take full responsibility for what happened. That’s why the person who was responsible went immediately.”
This ridiculous Prime Minister of ours can’t now string two sentences together without talking drivel. If sentence one is true, then he is resigning, as Guido’s commenters are already queueing up to point out. But sentence two says he isn’t. Not yet, anyway.
The BBC gets a lot of flak from right-wing bloggers, but the BBC is now objectively anti-Brown. Just by solemnly reporting everything that this ghastly and now absurd man says, with or without any further comment, they are destroying him.
Brown’s problem, to spell it out, is that he created the atmosphere within which The Emails were exchanged, and we all know it. He has been a dirty trickster all his adult life. Yet, again and again, he is now taking every opportunity he gets to deny this universally known truth. Not only he is a liar, which in politics is very forgiveable. He is an obvious liar.
The BBC’s caption under the video of Brown’s latest bout of self-strangulation says this:
Mr Brown said he was working to clean up British politics
LOL. In fact that is my LOL of the month so far.
You probably read all this first everywhere else, the exact same quotes and the exact same complaints, but I don’t care. This is a chorus now. Maybe Instapundit, who does read Samizdata and link to it from time to time, will finally work out what’s happening over here (a libertarian blogger is destroying a Prime Minister) and copy out a chunk of something relevant and comprehensible. Here would be an excellent place to look.
See also: this.
Alice Miles in the Times:
The media are all chorusing now: we knew, we called him McNasty and McPoison, we had nothing to do with him, he sent us foul messages, we didn’t like him. But the point is, we did know. We may not have known the detail of the nasty smears about senior Conservatives that Mr McBride was dreaming up, but we knew about the smears against his own side. We knew what he was up to, and we knew that he was being paid more than £100,000 a year of public money to do it – and we did nothing to stop it.
Mr McBride used the system of anonymous briefings under which political journalism operates to spread dirt about Labour opponents of Mr Brown. Should journalists still be under a duty to protect their sources when those sources are abusing public money, or should we have been bolder in exposing it? Mr McBride did not poison the well on his own. There has long been a “dirty tricks” cabal around Mr Brown that any Westminster journalist or minister could name – Ian Austin, Tom Watson, Ed Balls, Mr McBride and, formerly, Charlie Whelan, who is now political officer of the Unite super-union (and working hard to place favoured candidates in winnable seats for the next election).
The poisoning was at its worst in the run-up to the leadership noncontest two years ago. Yesterday I spoke to somebody who balked at challenging Mr Brown then, because he couldn’t face the poisoners. “It’s the reason why Gordon came to office untested,” he said. “When I considered challenging him for the leadership, people warned me it would be a very unpleasant campaign; and it would have been an unpleasant campaign because Gordon’s people would have run it in an extremely vicious way.”
Which makes quite a change from:
Mr Brown is a good, decent man but …
See what I mean about the dead tree dog pack? These people just are not scared of Gordon Brown any more, or of his dogs. They are now more scared of him getting booted out before they have each stuck their knives in. I can’t see Brown lasting into next year now, I really can’t. I give him a month at the most.
UPDATE: Here‘s Guido. Summary: Now they tell us. Watch the film clip and note that the Cameron machine gets mentioned, not at all grovellingly.
This, as the robot bomb in Dark Star said to the astronaut who was trying to persuade him not to explode, is fun. I think that things are now developing on the Gordon Brown front very fast.
As I have already commented today (I’ve recycled my comments earlier today here, and have added relevant links) on an earlier posting, I think that one of the key moments in this was when this got said, two days ago now:
The spokesman added that nobody in Downing Street knew of the e-mails and that it was Mr Brown’s view that there was “no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind”.
If Downing Street had left it at “nobody in Downing Street knew of the e-mails”, all might have been well. I say “well”, for these things are relative. Well as in Brown might have been able to stagger on for another year. But, I think fatally, they continued to the effect that it is Mr Brown’s view that there was “no place in politics for the dissemination or publication of material of this kind”. This is a flat lie, and we all know it to be a lie. The spokesman knows it. Brown knows it. We all know it.
Worse, from the purely tactical point of view, this lie turns the story from one of merely a few particular and, approximately speaking, deniable emails, into one where anything nasty presided over by Gordon Brown, and the longer ago the better, becomes relevant, because it proves that the Prime Minister not only does now believe in dirty tricks, but always has done. Suddenly, every newspaper hack in Britain knows what to ask, of anyone he can find with anything remotely like an answer. You were at school with Brown, were you? What was he like? Ran the University paper with him, did you? So, how did that work? Tell me about Scotland back in the eighties, the nineties, the noughts. Hm, sounds nasty. What’s that you say? Wales as well, well well. What exactly did he say about Blair? How exactly was Blair toppled? … The whole miserable litany of nastiness going back about three decades suddenly roars back into the centre of British politics, right now. The Prime Minister, with his fatuously excessive denial, has made this happen. (As always with these things, it is not the thing itself that does the fatal damage, it is the denials. See the prediction to that effect in this, although I had no idea then how quickly the fatal denial would come.)
For all the surreal daftness of the Daily Telegraph printing Guido stories after he’s blogged them, but mentioning him only to call his a “Tory blog”, Janet Daley does have a point when she says that this story only really got seriously going when the clunky old dead tree media got around to printing it. But now, printing it they are. The dog pack has now assembled and is baying for blood.
Even Brown’s demise will not quieten them, for as soon as he is gone, which I now think could happen very soon, the next cry will be: general election, general election, general election. Not only might the country soon be slightly less disastrously governed, it might be less disastrously governed before this week is finished. Because if a general election campaign does start in a week’s time, there is at least the faint hope that the politicians will – and call me a mad dreamer but I just cannot help saying this – stop doing things.
Well, maybe. We shall see. What I do definitely know is that when The Sun starts saying that Brown must go, that must count for something. The story is adorned with a picture of one of the mere Brown creatures (an MP and Minister called Watson), but pretty soon it is clear who is the main target:
The Prime Minister HIMSELF needs to be taken away by the men in white coats.
Men in white coats? How Guido, who has been blogging for month after month about the Prime Mentalist, must be loving that. The Prime Minister is not just disastrous. He is mad.
Every Labour politician in the country must now be in despair. Will this despair finally cause them to make the decision they should have made about Brown (“Oi! Brown! No-o-o-o-o!”) decades ago? Maybe, maybe. I really think that this time, they might. If you doubt this, do what these people are now doing. Consider the alternative.
UPDATE (see the update here): Watson is about to resign. He will spend the rest of his life being the ex-Minister for Digital Engagement, which according to a commenter on this was his actual, no really, title. CLANG! “Isn’t going to resign.” The wish was father to the thought. Sorry. He just didn’t know about the emails. Blogs eh? No quality control. Apart, that is, from the fear of looking like a prat, being told one is a prat, etc. etc. Here‘s the story.
Douglas Carswell, who is still merrily blogging away despite the happy intrusion of fatherhood, wonders whether the days of the spin doctor might be starting to fade. He says the internet is seriously starting to cut into the middleman of the spin doctor. I am not so sure about that – presumably, spinners will use the internet to try and prolong their role. But there is no doubt that spin doctors, rather like old fashioned advertisers, are seeing their roles changed, and in often uncomfortable ways, by the Internet. Look at how the traditional “gate keepers” of the media castle have been sidelined by outlets such as YouTube, for instance.
Talking of advertising, I just love the series, Mad Men.
The BBC does not even pretend to be impartial these days. Iain Dale, the blogger for those junkies of Westminster politics, notes that for the second week running, the Andrew Marr Sunday politics show did not have a single guest from the opposition Conservative or Liberal Democrat parties. There may be a suggestion that the broadcaster is going along with the government’s refusal to put on any ministers if their opposite numbers appear on the show.
I happen to think this is, unwittingly of the BBC perhaps, a good thing. By making the bias of that channel so blatant, it advances the BBC closer to the guillotine. At least when Fox News puts “fair and balanced” on its strapline, we know it is having a bit of a snigger.
Here is a website that is obviously produced by people very, very angry about what they see as the one-sided coverage of Mr Obama in his recent victorious campaign. You do not have to buy into conspiracy theories to be alarmed at the fawning press coverage that Mr Obama received during the campaign. As for the treatment of the McCain/Palin ticket, while I am certainly no great fan of either, the hysteria over Mrs Palin’s personal life or supposed wing-nuttery over religion seemed totally out of proportion.
In the end, we get the media we do because the underlying philosophical assumptions of the public at large are reflected by it and at the same time, those assumptions are held by the media outlets themselves. It pains me to say it but in many respects, the US is now closer to the social-democratic, corporatist model of Europe than many in the US will want to admit. There will, I hope, be a backlash, but whether that backlash is a particularly libertarian one is not something I am very confident about at this point.
Thanks to fellow contributor Paul Marks to alerting me to this website.
…and so they face the final curtain:
“Current estimates are that 700 of the 1,400 US newspapers will be out of business by the end of the next decade..”
Things have gotten so bad that the situation has even inspired a grass-roots effort of the kind usually aimed at curing deadly diseases, saving endangered species, or freeing the unfairly imprisoned: Today has been designated America’s “National buy a newspaper day”.
Their friends will say it clear, they’ll state their case of which they’re certain:
I don’t think it’s overstating the problem to say democracy is at stake.
But there were times, I’m sure you knew, when they’d print off something not quite true. But through it all, when there was doubt, they’d make it up and churn it out. The record shows, the public chose….
Tinsley says she’s optimistic that “after a period of markedly less in-depth reporting, the public will realize what it’s missing and the market will respond with a solution.”
….to do it our way.
Another milestone is reached as channels of distribution change:
2008 will be seen as a landmark year in global communications in the textbooks of 2100 – it was the year that the internet finally surpassed what was once considered an unassailable bastion of main media, newspapers, as the leading source of national and international news in America. The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press is an independent opinion research group that studies attitudes toward the press, politics and public policy issues. This year, for the first time in a Pew survey, more people said they relied mostly on the internet for news than those that cited newspapers (35%). Television retained top spot with 70% but it’s now clear that it’s when, rather than if, the internet will become the key news communications medium.
This is not as radical as headlined, given that newspaper and television websites are important sources for online information. Yet the march online will intensify as the credit crunch accelerates change. Curiously, this could result in less news, as the institutions of mainstream reporting wither away.
Watch for the state to support and protect the coterie of reporters, newspapers and channels on the grounds that politicians are far too important not to be heard. After all, this is already done in the UK with the licence fee, public sector advertisements for the Guardian and various subsidies. As the market retreats, subsidies will become more overt, expensive and extensive.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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