Touche.

Worse, I am speaking on a first time panel of econbloggers at the Milken Conference next week. This sort of thing never happens at a good time, but this is particularly badly timed.

If you have any ideas, aside from getting off Blogger and raising hell in Mountain View, they’d be very much appreciated.

Please keep checking back….

Also, posited last week that the Fed was tapping the deep pool of 401K annuities to place all this bank capital. It will be interesting to see in the filings who actually bought this lehman, MER, etc paper. As the WSJ recently wrote the whole 401K complex is merely a fee machine. Don’t know if you posted this article but it is worth the read. Yet another myth sold to the blissful public.

Finally, last week or so you had an article with David Kotak quoted via the FT as having good connections to the Fed. Having been subjected to this guy on CNBC and listened to him comment on the bottom every month since the credit crisis began, his contacts must be the switchboard operator.

Thanks for taking the close reading. You make a very good point, that too many journalists follow what turns out to be the Economist’s style maxim, “Simplify, then exaggerate.”

Despite his flaws, E-P does tend to bring up factoids that aren’t covered widely elsewhere. And he seems to be evenhanded in his downer views. He has bad things to say about just about everybody.

That´s right.
But look how he wrote it.

EP is writing about how Europe must be added to the “Anglo-Saxon and Japanese sick list”. So somehow he seems to exclude Anglo-Saxon UK from the European banking problems. While not including UK banking loses to the Anglo-Saxon (IMF US only) account either.

Look how he wrote it:
“Euro banks alone will lose $123bn (compared to $144bn for the US).”

It´s not Euro (as in Eurozone) banks, it´s ALL European banks!

IMF:
“As of March 2008, expected losses on subprime mortgage-related exposures are estimated at $123
billion in Europe and $144 billion in the United States (Table 5).”

But somehow “Europe” changed to “Euro”…

Likewise…
EP:
“The report contains a grim chapter on what may happen along the vast arch of over-heating silliness from the Baltics to the Black Sea, funded by Austrian, Swedish, German, Belgian, and Italian banks.”
(What about the overheating silliness in the UK?)

IMF:
“For Austria, the claims of the reporting banks on emerging Europe
amount to 23 percent of its banking system assets, though exposures seem well diversified across several countries and small with respect to each individual country. The exposures of banks in Belgium and Sweden to emerging Europe are also significant but remain below 10 percent of banking system assets. For the remaining countries, the exposures are negligible, including those of France, Germany, and Italy with the
most active banks in central and southeastern Europe.”

He doesn´t even mention a few quite significant differences between continental Europe and the “Anglo-Saxon” banking system.
Things that were mentioned in the IMF report.

I have to agree with anonymous.
EP reminds me of most “Anglo-Saxon” economics media reporters.

Their principle:
If something bad happens in their countries (USA, UK) it´s a necessary market correction which will undoubtedly lead to further growth in the near future.
If the exact same thing happens in the Eurozone, it´s a sign of doom and gloom for (continental) Europe.

Mind you, I´m not saying that Europe (which Europe? rent_to_own is right!) can decouple from the US economic problems.

EP is quoting the IMF’s estimates.

The number for the Euro banks is most likely accurate, but he really believes that US banks are going to take only 15% of the losses in this credit crisis? A recent report on WSJ about the claimed losses so far has shown, that the US banks will be taking 40-50% of the losses, not yet included the agencies, which will lose as well money.

The truth is simply that Evans-Pritchard is an ideological Europe hater who would never accept that the Euro economies could do better than the anglo-saxon world. If the fundamentals don’t fit with his believes he is twisting numbers.