Editorial:
Twit Journalism and the Professor from Hell
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Stocks slumped Tuesday on worries about economic growth at home and abroad, sending the Dow industrials to their biggest point drop since the day the market reopened after the Sept. 11 attacks.What follows is my very brief response, offered as it is from my position as a professor who turns without warning into a roaring bitch when journalistic stupidity passes a certain threshold.
A big decline in Chinese stocks, weakness in some key readings on the U.S. economy and news that Vice President Dick Cheney was the apparent target in a Taliban suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan all fueled the selling on Wall Street.
No, the world-wide stock market crash that happened on Tuesday, February 27, 2007, had nothing whatsoever to do with a suicide bomber who killed a bunch of people in Afghanistan in a failed and futile attempt to assassinate U.S. Vice President Richard Cheney. Absolutely nothing. To ascribe a planet-wide slide of stock markets that slashed the net assessed values of claims on residual cashflow anywhere from four to nine percent to "weakness in some key readings on the U.S. economy and news that Vice President Dick Cheney was the apparent target in a Taliban suicide bombing attack in Afghanistan" is evidence that CNNMoney.com believes—or is at the very least cynically willing to offer to its readers—the utterly ridiculous: a wholly false and imaginary world of the 21st Century where the markets of tens and hundreds of billions of trades totaling trillions and trillions of dollars stand in rapt awe of a slate of transitory U.S. government statistics (some of which had not even been released when the globe-spanning crash got underway) and a trouble-making, incompetent American Vice President.
The markets of the world weren't waiting to jump off a cliff if bad inventory numbers got pumped out by the U.S. government; the markets of the world weren't waiting to claw their chests open if Dick Cheney heard a big boom; and Wednesday, quite fortunately, I can assure you that not one of my business or economics students will be so fresh as to give me an explanation like that when I ask about the forces that caused the stock markets to slide as they did on Tuesday. That's because my students, even the rank freshmen who've been in my classes only about a month, know better than to give me stupid, simplistic, vapid explanations, particularly when I come in looking like I'm ready to eat someone's head off because I've been reading poundingly corny news analysis the night before.
Sadly, my students' unwillingness to spout the ridiculous means not one of them will ever qualify to become a "senior writer" for CNNMoney.com, where news analysis is predicated, first and foremost, on thinking like a twit and then displaying the wretched product of that thinking for all the world to read.
The Dark Wraith just winces at what passes for an educated financial journalist these days.
Published 2/28/2007 12:32:00 AM
<< 34 Comments Total
From Reuters, which at least saw fit to not mention the Cheney business, at least in this article:
Global stocks slide deepens in Europe, volatility soars.
Gee Wally, maybe the U.S. Treasury could take advantage of one of them there TeeVee services to help eliminate debt! Yeah! In no time we'd all be debt free and rollin' in shit just they say on TeeVee!
Or how 'bout the IRS settlin' for pennies on the dollar fer them outstandin' taxes that guy keeps on advertisin'?
I really gotta get away from the set!
good morning dw.....isn't there some logical fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc? the pronouncements of the stock gurus has for years been a source of humor for me. the cheney thing would more rationally be perceived, by moi anyway, as a reason for a bull stock market.
The twit would have been more on the mark to suggest the slide was a result of disappointment.
Good afternoon, Dark Wraith. Just received your package and watched it.
Wow.
I'm really impressed, not only do you have a great understanding of your material, but I bet you NEVER have a student fall asleep.
Your passion and skill at delivery of the material you have for your audience is impressive. In that way, we are alike, I tried to do the same thing and was successful to some extent. In a way, it's acting and sales, combined.
If I have to try to sell a pos product, I will not be working to my best, but if the product is something I can believe in, or an idea, then I will attempt to use every device I can to persuade my audience to hear what I have to say.
You remind me of some of the best educators I have known, and I always tried to emulate their style and performance. Thank you Sir.
The Oscar for Best Performance in a Classroom goes to:
Dark Wraith!
Congratulations.
In a few I'll watch it again, but I'll admit that it does make me a little jealous. I miss having a attentive, captive audience that burned to learn. It was so much fun.
Good Afternoon Dark Wraith,
The twit would have been more on the mark to suggest the slide was a result of disappointment.
That was my immediate take - both when I heard the news that Cheney had escaped - "Awww what a crying shame"
and when I heard the market tanked
"prob'ly 'cause the VP lives"
Now, my question is: what would have to happen for the whole shebang(NYSE or the world's whole stock markets aggregated) to come crashing down around the stockholders' ears?
I suspect that I'm off by a few orders of magnitude in my conception of the sheer size of the world's stock exchanges, and their ability to absorb shocks.
On the other hand, I think that the deciders may be off on their estimate of the strength and robustness of same.
Dark Wraith,
I think you do these folks more justice than they deserve...They are propagandists...{and poor ones at that}...To expect rational discourse,as well as insightful and thoughtful analisis is the same as expecting the corp.owners of the station to commit suicide
This hiccup in the market was enough to put the fear part of the fear and greed balance into play.
At some point,a lot of people will put down the kool-aid,wipe their mouth with their sleeve,and try to run to the exit.And then the interesting part starts
Anyone think that if the DICK had his head blown off the other day the markets might have acutally gone up?
Ben Ver what's his name, the chairman of the federal board feels that everything is OK and we should just shake off that bad shit.
I guess if I had his money and prestige I wouldn't give a shit either, but that would be a lie. I do give a shit.
I really hate these liars.
There, I'll shut up and go to sleep assuming I can.
Everything is so rosey, everything is so good, don't worry because you will become one of THEM.
What a wonderful world.
Anyone think that if the DICK had his head blown off the other day the markets might have acutally gone up?
Bark once for no and twice for yes....
Mr. Goat says WOOF WOOF!
OK, now I've been Carnivored for sure.
"Twit" is much too kind a word, Wraith.
...from my position as a professor who turns without warning into a roaring bitch when journalistic stupidity passes a certain threshold.
Staying tuned for the sequel. ;-)
Good Thursday morning, Dark Wraith.
I found your brief piece the most educational of the articles I've seen on the matter, but I do have one question (or perhaps comment): any time there is a blip in the market, it is almost always blamed on some seemingly unrelated (and often trivial and/or political) happening.
Even to me, it seems far-fetched that some of these "connections" exist. Yes, I suppose one could argue that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand led directly to WW I, but tying stock market blips to news items?
I could certainly see devastating weather having an effect on the markets, in terms of the food production sector bracing for tough times, but didn't the markets also head down after GHW Bush urped on the Japanese Prime Minister? I seem to recall an awful lot of similar claims.
Good Thursday morning, Dark Wraith.
I found your brief piece the most educational of the articles I've seen on the matter, but I do have one question (or perhaps comment): any time there is a blip in the market, it is almost always blamed on some seemingly unrelated (and often trivial and/or political) happening.
Even to me, it seems far-fetched that some of these "connections" exist. Yes, I suppose one could argue that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand led directly to WW I, but tying stock market blips to news items?
I could certainly see devastating weather having an effect on the markets, in terms of the food production sector bracing for tough times, but didn't the markets also head down after GHW Bush urped on the Japanese Prime Minister? I seem to recall an awful lot of similar claims.
I apologize for the duplicate post... Blogger and Google are apparently feeling cranky this morning...
Good morning, Andrew.
It is far easier to ascribe the complicated to the understandable than to ascribe the understandable to the obtuse.
Or something like that.
The Dark Wraith says, "You know what I mean."
Initially we heard that the tumble was caused by a computer glitch. The computer forgot out do sums.
Perhaps the PPT's computer was on the fritz? If they had a temporary outage, they wouldn't have been able to pump liquidity into the market for a time.
But more likely I think, the big institutions are selling off to cover debts, as the real estate related defaults pick up. They have a lot multiply leveraged debts to cover in times of short cash flow.
But what do I know. I had a friend many years ago that asked me for market advice and like a dumb chump I shared my opinion. The next day he told me that I was wrong and gave him the opposite advice the guy on the TV news gave him. So he went by the TV economist's prognostications.
My friend lost a chunk of change. He told me that the TV guy should've been right, but I was just lucky. He couldn't believe that people are put on the air to steer the herd in the wrong directions.
In the end, it was all my fault.
My friend didn't learn anything from that, but I did.
So who told the Taliban that Dick Cheney was secretly coming to that base, that day?
Good morning Mr. Wraith,
Entirely off topic but I thought you might find this of interest given a discussion some time ago.
Bill would hold makers of engineered crops liable for damage
My Pet Goat...
Thanks for that link.
Wow. I have so much trouble leaving comments at DW sites lately. sheesh.
Anyway, I read somewhere that the market went down because the terrorists MISSED blowing up Cheney. Had he been killed, the market would have gone up 500 points. Well that's what I read anyway.
Good evening, BlondeSense Liz.
My short article above was referenced by some blogger who was doing a survey of what bloggers had said about the meltdown. He commented rather curiously that my claim that the assassination attempt on Cheney had nothing to do with the crash was in contrast to "many" analysts' determination to the contrary.
Honest to goodness, I didn't realize I was saying something so darned controversial. Imagine that: the markets of the entire world cascaded downward in lockstep because that incompetent, war-mongering, chickenhawk of an oaf we have for a vice president heard a boom loud enough to make him download brownwear into his underwear.
I suppose it could have been worse: imagine what would have happened to the world's stock markets if, instead of a suicide bomber, it had been a suicide wedgie-giver!
Whoo-boy! Now, that would have been the end of financial civilization as we know it.
The Dark Wraith shudders at what we as the human race just narrowly averted.
Good evening, Mr. Goat.
I am honestly grateful that you recall comments I made awhile back with regard to GMOs. I stand by my claim that we shall slowly come to realize that, in order to move forward with far better ways to improve crops, we'll have to take care of what has become a world-wide genetic toxic clean-up nightmare in the crop gene pools.
The proportions of the mess are simply staggering. I am hopeful that innovations in genetic engineering will allow us to do at least some of the elimination of these modified genes through virulent processes, but that method poses its own great risks.
I am, of course, mindful that many efforts to improve life progress through ugly, dangerous, harmful technologies, but this is simply ridiculous: the genome of just about every popular crop of the world is infected with genes that don't belong there and will be a show-stopper to better technologies (including "open source" genetic selection technologies within the actual, natural crop genomes, themselves).
Lord. And we thought the chemical toxic waste clean-ups of the 20th Century were expensive.
The Dark Wraith really likes how, the further into the future we go, the deeper into the toilet we find ourselves.
Good evening, Weaseldog.
That "computer glitch" claim proved to be utter nonsense: were that to have been the cause, the stock markets would have fully recovered the loss that occurred simply because staggering undervaluation of securities would have induced massive, rapid, unrelenting buying once the glitch had passed.
The stock markets regained only a fraction of what they had lost, and that was pure bargain hunting as investors picked up stocks that had gotten swept into the hurricane.
Obviously, however, there simply has to be an explanation other than the one about how six years of stunningly incompetent fiscal management by the Republicans has finally come home to roost.
Actually, it's been home all along as I've pointed out time and again in my continuing series of analyses on the performance of major index portfolios during the Bush Administration. This most recent correction is actually nothing but a return to the trend line of miserable performance I'd been reporting all along.
To me, that smack-down yesterday was no surprise at all, and the one that happened in China was what I had expected; but I'll tell you this much: that was only the beginning of China's financial woes.
"Market reformers," my backside. All they did was prove that mercantilism isn't just for capitalists with low IQs.
The Dark Wraith is in an uncharitable mood this evening.
Good evening, Roger.
The post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy is the standard way for many financial analysts. I cannot bring myself to watch or listen to financial reporting these days precisely because of the pervasiveness of this fallacious logic. Financial markets go up or down, and the analysts pull something completely ludicrous out of the air to explain it; and most of the time, this is because they simply refuse to buy into the efficient market hypothesis, which takes all the fun out of predicting, prognosticating, explaining, and all the other things that make people who don't actually live in the financial markets the experts who make money off the suckers who don't live there either.
Grr.
The Dark Wraith feels like he's about to get on one of those Rant-n-Roll soapboxes everyone hates to see him get on.
DW,
I think many of us have reluctantly accepted that we are swimming in an ever deepening toilet.
I worry that soon someone is going to remember to flush, if for no other reason than to make room for more of us!
Good morning, Father Tyme.
Flushing would at least give us something new to look at.
The Dark Wraith is weary of the Neo-Con Tidy Bowl Man's song and dance routine.
I think many of us have reluctantly accepted that we are swimming in an ever deepening toilet.
That's one of those "is the glass half full or half empty" perspectives. Personally I think we've already been flushed and that the water level is dropping - gives the perspective of a deepening toilet.
Regardless, we still have a big asshole hanging over our head with bush and dick.
The Dark Wraith reaches for the anatomical plug.
DW,
I'm not sure they make 'em that large!
Think "inflatable dirigible," Father Tyme.
The Dark Wraith goes to fetch the helium pump.
DW,
Do us a favor...hydrogen instead! Methane ain't quite as nice!
Bungholes. Gasses. Etc.
Sounds like we're edging closer in these comments to another litany of "fart-lighting episodes".
Somebody at least strike a match, or give it to me so I can.
The Dark Wraith feels like he's about to get on one of those Rant-n-Roll soapboxes everyone hates to see him get on.
Thu Mar 01, 08:14:34 PM EST
I love Rant-n-Roll,
Put another quarter in the juke box, Baby!
moody blue,
Juke-boxes are a quarter now!!!!
Damn inflation!