You might have thought this morning's financial headlines would be highlighting all the deep trouble we're in. After all, stock markets in Asia and Europe fell sharply today, following yesterday's blood-bath on Wall Street. Spreads on Italian debt are widening again. Nominal gold has reached an all time high, as desperate investors seek someplace other than sagging US $ assets to hide. The Swiss Central Bank has just slashed interest rates to zero, in an attempt to prevent the Sw Franc from becoming the world's key reserve currency, wiping out Swiss exporters. Japan's Central Bank is struggling with a yen that is still hovering around 77 to the $, the strongest ever, because it is killing exports. Meanwhile, the Fukishima reactor has just developed an even more lethal leak.... Yet back here in the Empire, most business journalists are still mesmerized by credit ratings and all the continuing deficit reduction horseplay in Washington. Indeed, CNN and Market Watch are convinced that all signs are up, and that we're headed for a "market bounce."
This is no accident. In today's tough media world, the median biz journalist in Washington or New York is now a 25-30 year old kid who has has never studied economics, never worked in business, and is expected to file three stories a day. They simply have no time to do much fact-checking or first-hand reporting, and they barely know what questions to ask in the first place. Furthermore, if they go out on a limb and challenge some Senator or White House official in a sharp way, they tend to lose access -- which is critical to the production line daily reporting. So they get along by going along with the prevailing mood, and whatever stories the "rest of the pack" is chasing.
In these tough times, you have to do your own digging, and seek out tough-minded, iconoclastic, critical points of view that bother to do some independent reporting. Apart from that, so far as economic journalism is concerned, we pretty much get what we pay for.
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