Category Archives: Media watch

Media, Congress Waking Up to Freddie and Fannie Default Risk

It’s amazing how a problem isn’t a problem until it’s presented as one on television or a respected print outlet. Never mind the fact that the cognoscenti have been worried about the possibility that the two big mortgage guarantors, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were too thinly capitalized relative to their massive balance sheets. Never […]

Quelle Surprise! National Association of Realtors Says Many Housing Markets Doing Well

A MarketWatch story “Home prices aren’t tanking everywhere,” has the all the earmarks of being a National Association of Realtors plant. Note that it’s even told from the perspective of supposedly well-meaning (as opposed to commission-motivated) brokers trying to educate clients that the press is wrong, things really aren’t that bad. Here’s the gist of […]

The Economist’s Cheery View of Credit Default Swaps

It’s remarkable how attending an industry love-fest can distort one’s perception. The Economist seems to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for International Swaps and Derivatives Association view that counterparty risk in the credit default swaps market isn’t all that big an issue. Its article, “Clearing the fog.” while mentioning the little problem that led […]

Paulson’s Cosmetic, Cynical Financial Regulation "Reform"

Why is it that the media feels compelled to take pronouncements from government officials more or less at face value? By now, they ought to know that if someone from the Bush Administration is moving his lips, odds are it’s a lie. Today’s object lesson is the so-called financial services regulatory reform plan announced by […]

Bloomberg Pronounces Hope for Subprimes Based on Single Deal

An article by John Berry at Bloomberg, “Fed Actions Defuse Subprime ARM Rate Reset Bomb,” is extraordinarily misleading, claiming that a Fed paper based on a single pool of MBS issued by New Century in 2006 shows that subprimes will work out much better than conventional wisdom says. Let’ s start with Berry: Many analysts […]

Bear: Did the Fed and Treasury Push Too Hard?

Andrew Ross Sorkin in the New York Times provides some important background on how the Bear deal wound up being retraded today. But he does his readers and the greater public a huge disservice by telling the story so as to flatter Wall Street. According to Sorkin, the $2 price for Bear was the Fed’s […]

Mirable Dictu! A Good Column by Ben Stein!

I nearly fell off my chair. Ben Stein’s column this week, “What McCain Could Do About Taxes,” is sensible and vastly more tightly written and argued than his previous work. No free association or gratuitous name-dropping, no leaps of logic, no wishful thinking. More shocking, not only does he take issue with the Republican party […]

Rating Agency Conflicts in Munis Coming Under Fire

In “States and Cities Start Rebelling on Bond Ratings,” the New York Times attempts to make the case that municipalities can lead a revolt against Wall Street: Does Wall Street underrate Main Street? A growing number of states and cities say yes. If they are right, billions of taxpayers’ dollars — money that could be […]

Ben Stein is Exxon Mobil

Ben Stein gives us another installment of his usual sloppy thinking. In his latest offering, “Exxon Mobil Needs a Hug,” he declares: After all, Big Oil is big us. And we need us. Since I don’t consider myself Big Oil, and I imagine most readers would object to being considered to be Big Oil, all […]

Surprise! It’s Rough Out There in the Job Market

The New York Times has an odd story today, “Is a Lean Economy Turning Mean?” which discusses how conditions for workers have become dire. New jobs are scarce, and many of the ones out there don’t pay as well as what employees got in previous roles. Hello, downward mobility. What makes the piece peculiar is […]

The Sham of Sovereign Wealth Fund Negotiations

The Wall Street Journal reports today in “U.S. Pushes Sovereign Funds To Open to Outside Scrutiny,” that the US Treasury Department talking to two large sovereign wealth funds, Singapore’s Temasek and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, as the first steps in a process to “”draft rules to oversee the behavior of such funds, without discouraging […]

"Antidepressant drugs don’t work"

The headline above comes from the UK’s Independent. I could have picked number of variants (BBC, “Anti-depressants ‘of little use‘,” Financial Times, “Antidepressants ‘have no impact‘”), but what is interesting is that as of this hour, this study, published by the University of Hull, is getting MSM coverage solely in the UK and Commonwealth countries. […]

Journal vs. Financial Times on HSH-UBS Subprime Dispute

From time to time, there are marked disparities in how events are reported in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. In the overwhelming majority of times, it’s the Journal’s reporting that’s deficient. Today’s sighting fits the classic pattern. The difference in headlines says it all. The Journal’s is: “German Bank Blames UBS for […]

The Wall Street Journal Fulminates About Dinallo

Full disclosure: I am no fan of the Wall Street Journal’s editorials: in fact, I’ve commented on the liberties they often take with facts. But when they are on a pet peeve, they can become so overwrought that the level of agitation alone is amusing. And just because they are often wrong doesn’t mean they […]

Will Paulson Come to Regret His Words?

We were one of the first to say that former Citigroup Charles Prince would come to regret his end-of-the-cycle-is-nigh comment initially reported in the Financial Times: Chuck Prince on Monday dismissed fears that the music was about to stop for the cheap credit-fuelled buy-out boom, saying Citigroup was “still dancing.” We are so bold as […]