Sunday, June 5, 2011

Bad financial advice: the great failure of media

When the mistakes of investors are the subject of articles the hype of the media in
the recent past is usually not the subject, something they were just never into.
For instance that pretty popular video on You Tube is, for the media, just not worth
mentioning even though it is one the best examples of what the media and financial
experts were up to.
Some of the characters who had the big say then could by now easily apply for a role
in a financial thriller, even a James Bond movie.





Another example of such voluntary censorship  is the farewell letter
of Andrew Lahde, a hedge fund manager, who identified the problems
correctly soon enough and began short selling. He quit his job in 2008
with a funny farewell letter in which he made it clear what he thought of
those who provided the opportunities.

Or, take a  look at the role newspapers played, in the US and Europe,
their complicity and sins in the financial crisis, here a nice summary by
Danny Schechter.  about American newspapers. (The newspapers in
the US are meantime in their sixth year of decline.)

Pretty much the same criticism could be written about European media.
These are just examples.


As a final example of how the media manage to become almost
eternal problems the way the Irish media turned round can be seen
as prime example. A couple of years ago the Irish media were great
in hyping up anything. And then, when  things turned sour, the bubbles
they helped to create burst, they turned to the old fashioned "bad news
are good news", real body snatchers who are making a show of the problems
and are now something like cheerleaders for wailing, whining, ranting,
problem loving, while badly informing, thus assisting people to get ever
deeper into problems.
















No comments: