It’s high time that reporters start lifting the veil to look at exactly who is behind the “research” put out by think tanks. Even drug company research, which many members of the public now know to view with some doubt, at least has an actual investigation of some sort underpinning it (the doubts about them usually involve study design and/or interpretation of results). Think tank end product should be taken with even more salt, since it too often is the intellectual equivalent of a CDO: taking junk ideas and dressing it up in a structure and a brand name so that most people will regard it as AAA-rated thinking. A piece by Andrew Ross Sorkin at the New York Times is an all-too-rare and badly need hard look at the less than savory process of creating impressive-looking arguments in favor of special-interest serving policies. The object lesson is a vehemently anti-derivatives reform paper presented by Keybridge Research, which claims that derivatives reform will result in the loss of 130,000 jobs and reduce corporate spending by $6.7 billion.
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