By Tom Adams, an attorney and former monoline executive and Yves Smith A common fallacy is to assume that situations are polar: win/lose, black/white, hot/cold, heads/tails. But more often, given A, “not A” is not the opposite of A. Conventional wisdom in the financial media is that the settlement announced by the SEC over its […]
Read more...For those who did not catch wind of it, the Peterson Foundation, which has long had Social Security and Medicare in its crosshairs, held a bizarre set of 19 faux town hall meetings over the previous weekend to scare participants into compliance and then collect the resulting distorted survey data, presumably to use in a […]
Read more...I want the word “reform” back. Between health care “reform” and financial services “reform,” Obama, his operatives, and media cheerleaders are trying to depict both initiatives as being far more salutary and far-reaching than they are. This abuse of language is yet another case of the Obama Adminsitration using branding to cover up substantive shortcomings. […]
Read more...I recoiled on the first reading of Noam Schrieber’s “The Breakup,” an account of the recently-cooled relationship between JP Morgan and the White House at The New Republic this week. And I don’t like it much better upon a second perusal. So much of the piece is devoted to uncritical recitation of pure JP Morgan […]
Read more...I’m not quite certain how to calibrate journalism American Banker style, but I found this article, “Challenges to Foreclosure Docs Reach a Fever Pitch,” (sadly, subscription only, e-mailed by Chris Whalen), to be both interesting and more than a tad disingenuous. The spin starts with the headline, it’s a doozy. The “challenge to foreclosure documents” […]
Read more...A good Washington DC contact told me that a public relations/media push to demonize those who decide to walk away from mortgages they can still afford to pay (aka “strategic defaulters”) is underway. Expect to see a good bit of moral fervor as those who choose to cut their losses are attacked as immoral, irresponsible, […]
Read more...I know the headline above verges on “dog bites man” but the New York Times story, “In Louisville, View of Banks’ Role in the Everyday” is pure financial services industry PR masquerading as Norman Rockwellesque treacle. I know Fridays in the summer are usually slow news days, and the Grey Lady might occasionally have to […]
Read more...This video from a Mexican news broadcast (hat tip reader Gonzalo Lira) is nominally off topic for this blog, but I thought I’d include it precisely because it illustrates one of the mechanisms of propaganda: how the non or under reporting of key facts is used to manage popular perceptions. This video appears getting play […]
Read more...What term do you use to describe spin about spin? Spin squared? Meta spin? Whatever you chose to call it, a classic example is in full view in a New York Times article, “Another Torrent BP Works to Stem: Its C.E.O.” If you were to believe the New York Times, which all too often appears […]
Read more...Reader Richard Smith provided a sighting of bank boosterism, courtesy The Economist: The happy secret of Western banking is that the system in aggregate now has lots of capital (see chart) relative to the net losses experienced over the crisis. The kind of erosion of capital forecast by the Federal Reserve’s stress tests last year, […]
Read more...One of the odd things I observe is the way some posts or issues regularly elicit heated reactions. For instance, early in the days of euro wobbliness, some readers in Europe would go a bit off the deep end at the suggestion that the Eurozone has serious structural weaknesses. It wasn’t so much that these […]
Read more...Wow, the Obama Administration is less than a year and a half old, and it’s already twiddling with the record. I was gobsmacked to see this section in a post by Felix Salmon today, on a new book by Jonathan Alter and a New York Magazine cover story by John Heilemann: Both Alter and Heilemann […]
Read more...It’s hard to tell whether the story at the Guardian, based on a memo apparently leaked by Germany’s finance ministry, is overstating the situation in contending that changes Germany will demand for the euro regime could require a Lisbon treaty negotiation. From the article: Following Greece’s debt emergency and with the euro in the throes […]
Read more...Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you. And just because skepticism of Eurozone salvage operations is warranted does not mean that all of the criticisms should be taken at face value. Andrew Dittmer pointed out a speech he correctly deemed to be “surprising” by Lorenzo Bini Smaghi, […]
Read more...The first part of this two part series proved to be very popular among blog readers, given the level of comments, so I thought I’d feature the second part, which was posted by Real News Networks on Monday. Enjoy!
Read more...