I don’t know how to characterize the state of the media in the US. A controlled press? Self-censorship? Whatever the cause, the result is that important stories are so often watered down that the kid-gloves treatment comes perilously close to misreporting. This isn’t news to any close reader of the US press. But it is […]
Read more...Sorry for the number of posts from the Financial Times today, but it happens to have stories no one else is carrying (yet). The FT tells us today that the EU has ordered Microsoft to hand over what the company calls “sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no […]
Read more...The summary of the second report is due out this Friday. Oddly, this sneak preview appears, at least so far, only in the Financial Times (I checked the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times). As described below, the second report delves deeper into the nature and scope of likely changes, and how they […]
Read more...Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal had a story, “Economy Can Withstand More Mortgage Foreclosures,” which said, About 1.1 million foreclosures are likely to result from jumps in monthly payments on adjustable-rate home-mortgage loans made in 2004 through 2006, according to a study by First American CoreLogic. Christopher Cagan, director of research at the real-estate-information concern […]
Read more...Yesterday, we had a link and some commentary on a front-page New York Times article, “Crisis Looms in Mortgages,” by Gretchen Morgenson. Morgenson likes a take-no-prisoners style of writing, and she tends to be controversial due to her forceful articles about CEO pay. I will confess to having read past it (I am inured to […]
Read more...Um, because Barney Frank is making their case? This great post from Dean Baker at Beat the Press makes a simple and persuasive argument: Representative Barney Frank has proposed a law that would require corporations to have non-binding polls of their shareholders on CEO compensation packages. According to Marketplace Radio, the opponents of this measure […]
Read more...Curiouser and curiouser. Greenspan uses the “R” word in Hong Kong, and the Chinese stock market goes down 9% the next day. Now the sequence of the two events might have been pure coincidence (the main cause for the Chinese sell off was the announcement that the powers that be were going to tighten margin […]
Read more...Roland Piquepaille’s Technology Trends, in his post “Super-green minivans possible today,” picks up on a Mercury News story that discusses what amounts to a low-emissions minivan, one that meets the stringent California requirements for 2016. Except this car hasn’t been built yet: According to the Mercury News, the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) has designed […]
Read more...We’ve noted before that the Journal’s editorial pages are not the place to go if you want reality-based commentary. This piece, “Wall Street Journal AMT Editorial,” from Linda Beale on ataxingmanner (which came to our attention via Mark Thoma’s Economist’s View) dissects a recent WSJ editorial on the alternative minimum tax, or AMT. For readers […]
Read more...So advises the Wall Street Journal, in a commentary, “Worth the Weight,” by Arthur Brooks. Now contrarian articles usually make for good reading, and presumably that was the reason the WSJ ran this piece. Oh, it’s in the Saturday edition going into the long Presidents’ Day weekend, a good time for lighter fare (no pun […]
Read more...Before we go any further with this item, in which rats in a study developed cancer from consuming genetically modified potatoes, it’s important to note that this was one study and the study was “badly flawed”. Half the rats died (which half?) and the results were based only on the survivors. But this item post-worthy […]
Read more...Wonder why the Financial Times seems to do a consistently better job of reporting on topics that are inconvenient to American executives, like institutional investors taking serious steps to rein in their compensation, that the US media outlets covering the same beat, like the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Bloomberg? This story […]
Read more...We’ve had accounting fraud, pay that seldom bears any relation to performance, and options backdating. And it appears we aren’t done yet. The next bit of CEO malfeasance that is getting a bit more press is that CEOs are working in concert with private equity firms to buy the companies they head on the cheap. […]
Read more...The Wall Street Journal’s editors have weighed in with their objections to the first of four reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued last week. And predictably, they dispute the work of 2000 scientists from 113 countries by claiming the “full scientific report” due out in May undercuts the “short policy report” issued […]
Read more...Readers may have noticed that we have a soft spot in our heart for negative news about the economy. That’s because the business and popular press dwell on the postive and give short shrift to the other side (with the exception of the Financial Times). So we have a tense geopolitical climate, global warming looking […]
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