Category Archives: Media watch

Quelle Surprise! Feds Dust off Old Rogue Traders CDO Case to Burnish “Tough on Mortgage Crime” Credentials

The powers that be are in the process of seeing how they can burnish their “tough on bank crime” credentials while not ruffling anyone really important. And the case featured in the Wall Street Journal, “U.S. Plans Charges on Bond Fraud,” illustrates the sort of enforcement theater we are likely to see over the coming months.

Wow! Charges! Better yet, criminal charges! Finally the Administration is getting tough on crime.

Right. It’s tough on crime against banks.

ProPublica’s Off Base Charges About Freddie Mac’s Mortgage “Bets”

A new ProPublica story, “Freddie Mac Betting Against Struggling Homeowners,” treats the fact that Freddie Mac retains the riskiest tranche of its mortgage bond offering, known as inverse floaters, as heinous and evidence of scheming against suffering borrowers.

The storyline in this piece is neat, plausible, and utterly wrong. And my e-mail traffic indicates that people who are reasonably finance savvy but don’t know the mortgage bond space have bought the uninformed and conspiratorial ProPublica thesis hook, line, and sinker.

Doug Smith: Useful Idiot Watch – Matt Yglesias

By Douglas K. Smith, author of On Value and Values: Thinking Differently About We In An Age Of Me

Earlier this month, Matthew Yglesias of Slate tweeted “EXCLUSIVE: The activities of individual business executives have no relationship to the level of economy-wide employment.”

It’s hard to choose what is most ridiculous here…

Adam Davidson, the 1%’s Lord Haw-Haw, Fellates Wall Street

Although I endeavor to treat high dudgeon as an art form, it is difficult to find words adequate to convey the level of ridicule and opprobrium that Adam Davidson’s latest New York Times piece, “What Does Wall Street Do for You?” deserves. I had the vast misfortune to come across it late last week, and have gotten an unusually large volume of incredulous reader e-mails about it. Ms. G’s e-mail headline “NYT – Not a Parody” was typical:

This one is so bad, even for NYT, I’m wondering if the paper wasn’t secretly sold to Murdoch, Bloomberg & the Fed Reserve sometime in the past few days.

American Exceptionalism and Euro-Bashing, Adam Davidson Style

Adam Davidson has an article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, “The Other Reason Europe is Going Broke,” that manages the impressive feat of making you stupider than before you read it. It misrepresents most of the few facts it contains in appealing to American prejudices about our cultural, or in this case, economics superiority, to sell worker bashing.

Davidson uses the spectacle of Europe going into an economic nosedive to claim that one of the big things wrong with Europe is its spoiled workers. The piece is anchored in a glaring, fundamental misrepresentation. It argues that Americans are much better off than Europeans because we have a higher GDP per capita (more on that in due course) and asserts that that is because Europeans are not able to compete in world markets:

Philip Pilkington: When Economic Journalists Get Out of Their Depth

By Philip Pilkington, a journalist and writer living in Dublin, Ireland

Working as a journalist and as an opinion writer each have their charms. Journalists have the pleasure of discovery and revelation: uncovering new facts, talking to people, sometimes acting as a catalyst to move events forward.

Opinion writing, aside from being a comfy way to make a living, gives the writer greater stylistic freedom, and the challenge and opportunity of making a dent in readers’ views. The problem is that you have a limited amount of space and, often, an easily distracted readership. Now, that’s fine for something like, say, an observation about an upcoming election or the loutish behavior of a major sports figure but it is a patently awful format from which to raise Big Questions.

The normally sound Clive Crook fell into this trap in an opinion piece at Bloomberg, “A Crisis of Leadership, Not a Crisis of Capitalism.” Bluntly, this article is a train wreck.

Mark Ames: Failing Up With Joshua Foust – Meet The “Evil Genius” Massacre-Denier Who Shills For War Profiteers

Yves here. We cross posted a piece by Mark Ames on a massacre of Kazakh oil workers striking against KazMunaiGaz, a company “owned” by the son-in-law of the Kazakh president for life. Its American JV partners are led by Chevron.

The story got a surprising amount of pushback here and on Ames’ site, and some of reaction did not look organic. That led Ames to do further digging, and the resulting piece below gives a window into how big corporations go about neutralizing embarrassing news coverage. The more the public knows about the modus operandi of people like Foust, the faster they will be forced to seek more honorable lines of employment.

In this blogger’s humble opinion, this piece is a gold standard takedown of a truly deserving target.

JP Morgan “Greed Washing”: Sponsors Orwellian TV Advertorial to Tout $2 Million of Charity Spending

The New York Times (hat tip Mary B) took note of a seamy JP Morgan effort at brand burnishing:

In a gambit to promote its charitable work — and maybe polish its image, which has suffered since the financial collapse in 2008 — JPMorgan Chase is financing and sponsoring the “American Giving Awards,” which will be televised by NBC on Saturday night. The two-hour show, with Bob Costas as host, will profile recipients of Chase donations, will be book-ended by Chase commercials and will regularly remind viewers that the whole event is “presented by Chase.”…/

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Dog Whistle Economics’ Code Words

Here are a few code words that you will often see in economic writing followed by their true meaning. The code word is a dog whistle. It acts like an emotional marker only for those attuned to the underlying ‘moral’ issues implied by the code. While you may agree with the logical framework behind the […]

Obama Road Tests Hopey-Changey Big Lie 2.0: He’ll Reincarnate as Teddy Roosevelt if You Are Dumb Enough to be Fooled Twice

Wow, I have to hand it to Obama’s spinmeisters. They’ve managed to find a way to resurrect his old hopium branding by calling it something completely different that still has many of the old associations.

And we have a twofer in Obama’s launch of his new branding as True Son of Teddy Roosevelt. Never mind that Teddy, unlike Obama, was accomplished in many walks of life and had meaningful political accomplishments (such as reforming the corrupt New York City police department) before becoming President at the tender age of 42. The second element of this finesse is that Obama is using the Rooseveltian imagery to claim he will pass legislation to get tough on Big Finance miscreants. That posture, is of course meant to underscore the idea that you just can’t get the perps with the present, weak set of laws.

Team Obama may have planned to wheel this new, improved image out later, with the timing accelerated by Judge Jed Rakoff’s decision against a proposed $285 million settlement between the SEC and Citigroup over a bum CDO in which Citi allegedly wielded considerable influence over its contents so it could bet against it.