George Orwell gave a powerful warning of the dangers of ceding control of the language, and therefore the range of possible thoughts, to authorities who understood how to shape it so to render the population incapable of independent action. I am a sensitive to the ways in which we allow manipulators of various sorts, from […]
Read more...Are we supposed to take this posturing seriously? The media is now peddling more and more banker-favoring narratives with a straight face. The Columbia Journalism Review described one last week, how a little Goldman Kabuki theater to appease the peasants was incorrectly depicted as a serious move: …the press way overplays what is essentially a […]
Read more...The New York Times has a generally solid piece. “Debt Raters Avoid Overhaul After Crisis,” by David Segal, on how pretty much nothing meaningful is being done to reform the rating agencies. That of course is particularly disturbing since there are only three agencies that count, and they do not posses anything remotely resembling the […]
Read more...This came via e-mail from a legitimate source: As a former staffer for one of these Senators [on the Banking Committee], I’ll just point out the obvious: most of them have their fingers in the wind right now. they’re leaning to confirm BB, because they don’t want to be out on a limb, and there’s […]
Read more...There is a curious disparity in the reports on Bernanke’s odds of reconfirmation as Fed chairman. Now on the one hand, incumbents generally have an upper hand. But incumbents seldom preside over massive disasters that started on their watch and remain sufficiently unobservant as to be unable to connect the dots that they might have […]
Read more...Full disclosure: I love Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Too Big To Fail and think everyone should read it. But having said that, Sorkin has spent a bit too much time running with the big dogs. In today’s piece in the New York Times, he hones in on an amendment added to the Paul/Grayson bill passed last […]
Read more...These reminders courtesy Josh Rosner (be sure to watch in full):
Read more...It should come as no surprise that those at the top of the food chain get preferential treatment on all levels. But this still stinks to high heaven. Employees of the Goldman, the Fed, Citigroup, and other banks are getting H1N1 vaccine allotments out of proportion to what can be justified from a public health […]
Read more...The Treasury invited a small group of bloggers for a “discussion” with senior officials on Monday. Initially, the meeting was to be background, which is a sort of journalistic “FYI but you can’t use it” but we were told at the meeting that we could discuss the meeting as long as remarks were not attributed […]
Read more...By George Washington of Washington’s Blog. Financial insider and commentator Yves Smith wrote an essay last week entitled “MSM Reporting as Propaganda” arguing that the government has been using propaganda to make people think that things are getting better, no one is angry, and – therefore – no one should get upset: The message, quite […]
Read more...I was on the Andrew Hall/Phibro beat for a while and must confess I dropped it in the finish-the-book crunch. I neglected to follow up on and important aspect of the story that is still germane. Readers may recall the brouhaha: Hall, a high stakes oil trader, had received nearly $100 million in 2008 at […]
Read more...I’m of two minds about taking up this theme, since stating what ought to be obvious but is nevertheless unpleasant and inconvenient is apt to get one branded as lunatic fringe. Access journalism has created what is in many respects a controlled press. And that matters because people are far more suggestible than most of […]
Read more...Quelle horreur, some smart people are starting to question whether banking serves a redeeming social function. Of course, in the abstract, it does. Banking (or more accurately, extending credit) is essential for commerce. But any essential support function, if it overpriced in relationship to its true value, becomes a drag on the productive economy. And […]
Read more...In the early days of this blog, I would often wind up comparing coverage of news between the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal because the offender (almost without exception the Journal) had done a job so poor or misleading that it merited comment. Then the credit crisis forced the Journal to up its […]
Read more...I will confess I missed a post opportunity Thursday AM, when an alert reader sent a link to a USA Today story, “34 banks don’t pay their quarterly TARP dividends, ” but I decided to return to it precisely because it has gotten little attention: The U.S. taxpayers’ investments in smaller banks are increasingly at […]
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