Tag Archives: Big Media/Big Tech

China and the Dollar

“The business site Bloomberg is running a story today titled Yuan Deposes Dollar on China’s Border in Sign of Trade’s Future. [Interestingly, after being up for over an hour, this story suddenly went away between 1 and 2 am. Before coming back in what seemed like a slightly less hard hitting form.]

When Treasury Secretary Geithner spoke on June 1st to students at Peking University and claimed that America was in good shape and China’s dollar investments were safe. His assurances were greeted with loud hoots of laughter from the assembled students, many of them the sons and daughters of China’s elite. Geithner humiliation was barely reported in America, but it seemed to resonate much more strongly elsewhere around the globe. Spawning many stories similar to the story running today at Bloomberg.com about how people are digging up that jar full of dollars and replacing them with gold or border traders switch from dollars to other currencies. The disbelieving laughter of China’s students may well mark a sea change. The begin of the end for the dollar’s reign as the world’s reserve currency. With America’s politicos planning to spend approximately double what they expect to collect in taxes this year, it is easy to see why the students were amused by Geithner posturing. But the chaos that will ensue if a dollar crisis were to suddenly force America’s politicos to start living within America’s means won’t be funny.” (from humods.com)

Are you f@cking kidding me??? AP Praises Goldman

I suspect the masters of the universe didn’t like all the Goldman hate and made some phone calls to friends in the media.

Goldman Sachs’ $2.7B profit shows firm’s prowess
“Goldman Sachs is emerging as the king of post-meltdown Wall Street. The New York-based banking giant took advantage of improving markets to widen the gap between itself and its competitors, earning more than $2.7 billion during the second quarter.” (from news.yahoo.com)

How the hell can these guys be praised for their prowess after taking BILLIONS of dollars from people like me and you???

That’s it, I’m adding www.goldmansachs666.com to my blogroll. That’ll show them!

Hypocritical NYT calls Iranian interrogation tactics “torture”

All of this is from salon.com:

Clark Hoyt, New York Times Public Editor, April 26, 2009:

A LINGUISTIC shift took place in this newspaper as it reported the details of how the Central Intelligence Agency was allowed to strip Al Qaeda prisoners naked, bash them against walls, keep them awake for up to 11 straight days, sometimes with their arms chained to the ceiling, confine them in dark boxes and make them feel as if they were drowning.

Until this month, what the Bush administration called “enhanced” interrogation techniques were “harsh” techniques in the news pages of The Times. Increasingly, they are “brutal” . . . .

Scott Shane, who covers national security, said he and his editor in the Washington bureau, Douglas Jehl, negotiated over the wording of the first paragraph. Shane wrote that methods used in the prisons were “widely denounced as illegal torture.” Jehl changed that to the “harshest interrogation methods”

. . . .

he said: “I have resisted using torture without qualification or to describe all the techniques. Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn’t been resolved by a court.

. . . .

The New York Times today:

Inflamed CNBC host calls bloggers ‘digital dickweeds’

“Television is a place of maturity and thought. The blogosphere is a place of ‘dickweeds.’ That’s according to CNBC host Dennis Kneale, who’s declared the recession over, and who went postal on critical financial bloggers Tuesday.” (Read more from rawstory.com)

Let them acknowledge THIS, as part of the reason big media is struggling – sending us (me) to Iraq, declaring the recession over, censoring and slandering Ron Paul, ignoring Palestine, reframing every important national debate as something irrelevant and quaint, instigating war with Iran, spreading irrational stock-market euphoria, vilifying freedom, rationalizing tyrrany. . . I am a blogger. Hear me roar!

Washington Post publisher apologizes for auctioning influence

“WASHINGTON (AP) — The Washington Post’s publisher apologized to readers Sunday for a plan to charge business leaders and lobbyists for intimate dinner discussions with government officials and the newspaper’s journalists.

A flier surfaced last week promoting a plan to charge $25,000 to sponsor one of a series of dinner parties that would include off-the-record conversations with Post journalists and access to Washington insiders. The series was canceled Thursday.” (Read more from finance.yahoo.com)

The Year The Newspaper Died

“As you may have noticed, newspapers have had a rough 2009. But you may not quite appreciate the magnitude of the collapse.

So far this year:

* 105 newspapers have been shuttered.
* 10,000 newspaper jobs have been lost.
* Print ad sales fell 30% in Q1 ’09.
* 23 of the top 25 newspapers reported circulation declines between 7% and 20%.

What happened?

The economy collapsed and advertising budgets went with it, accelerating a process already underway: the Internet’s erosion of the entire newspaper industry.” (Read more from businessinsider.com)

Don’t let these sob stories fool you. We are in a golden age of journalism. The old guard is just upset that they losing money and influence. Telling the truth is beginning to matter.

Taibbi’s Rolling Stone Article

A friend recently called my attention to Matt Taibbi’s Rolling Stone Article, “The Great American Bubble Machine.” Read it here.

Taibbi knows little about economics, and comes down on the wrong side of the most important question raised by our economic crisis – freedom or government?

For example, he writes: “an extremely unfortunate loophole in tbe system of Western democratic capitalism, which never foresaw that in a Society governed passively by free markets and free elections, organized greed always defeats disorganized democracy.”

This is bullshit. We should not condemn free markets until we’ve given them a chance.

His understanding of the causes of the Great Depression is completely anemic (no mention of inflationary monetary policies), and his explanation of how Goldman cheats the world makes no sense.

Matt Taibbi’s worst offense is calling for more regulation to “protect” us from the likes of Goldman. Regulation is exactly what got us here.

Sure, if banks commit fraud we need the government to put them in jail, but beyond that, all we need to do is let the fuckers go bankrupt when they get caught holding loans which should never have been made.

It’s completely schizophrenic for the government to subsidize bad loans (HUD, Freddie, Fannie), then hand the banks billions of tax-payer dollars (TARP), then say the problem is too much freedom. In a free market, irresponsible companies go bankrupt.

So Taibbi fails.

He does deserve praise for a couple things though – demonstrating the pervasiveness of Goldman Sachs alumni throughout our government and the banking world at large, and calling attention to Goldman Sachs, and evil, evil company. His criticism should be directed to their influence over the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Treasury, and policies which transfer our wealth to likes of Goldman.

One very good point he makes, is connecting Goldman to Cap & Trade – the hideous bit of legislation which just passed our Congress in order to “save” us from Global Wharming. It’s another big scam.

See Also: Taibbi responds to Goldman’s criticism of his article.

Krugman’s Intellectual Waterloo

Here is a brief article from mises.org followed by the email debate I had after sending it to a friend:

“Last Monday evening, Lew Rockwell, from a tip by someone named ‘Travis,’ posted this damning quote of Paul Krugman’s from a 2002 New York Times editorial:

To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Krugman. 2002. Calling for a housing bubble.

What’s more, by explicitly calling for a new bubble to replace the recently burst one, he anticipated by 6 years the Onion‘s hilarious “report” that “demand for a new investment bubble began months ago, when the subprime mortgage bubble burst and left the business world without a suitable source of pretend income.” Except Krugman was being serious.

The quote caught on in the blogosphere, to such an extent that Krugman actually responded in his New York Times blog Wednesday morning:

Guys, read it again. It wasn’t a piece of policy advocacy, it was just economic analysis. What I said was that the only way the Fed could get traction would be if it could inflate a housing bubble. And that’s just what happened.

So with a deft little two-step, Krugman paints himself as a doctor who gave an excellent diagnostic, and not a disastrous prescription. One of his ditto-heads posted on his blog that saying Krugman advocated or caused the housing bubble was ‘Like saying Nostradamus caused the rise of European fascism.’

. . . .

Mark Thornton on the Mises blog followed up with a devastating collection of 2001 Krugman quotes clearly documenting his support for inducing a housing bubble. The most damning of this batch is the following from a 2001 interview with Lou Dobbs:

Meanwhile, economic policy should encourage other spending to offset the temporary slump in business investment. Low interest rates, which promote spending on housing and other durable goods, are the main answer. [emphasis added]

How the hell can anyone spin that as a purely academic musing, and not a policy recommendation for artificially inducing housing spending?” (Read more from mises.org)

Him:

Hi Roman,

Read the “quote” which isn’t a quote at all really. If you read the article by Krugman he was paraphrasing another guy, some investment banker and that “quote” was his words not Krugman. I don’t think Krugman was advocating that at all. I think the most salient part of the eight year old article lies in the last two paragraphs.

Misquoting and manipulating other peoples words smacks too much of FoxNoise. So I think that Lew Rockewll and the mysterious “Travis” are full of crap.

www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105783108

Me:

W.r.t. Paul Krugman, I read your email and was appalled by the possibility that both Lew Rockwell and the Mises Institute made a very sloppy (mis)quotation. I was going to write to them. But after looking at Krugman’s editorial, I don’t think they did.

Word for word:

“To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.”

Krugman clearly calls for a housing bubble.

This is consistent with his unrelenting justification of government spending, and the philosophy of his hero, Maynard Keynes, who thought that all problems could be spent away without future reprocussions. Unfortunately, the future is now here. In 1927 Keynes famously said there would be no more market crashes, ever. Somehow his disastrous policies and predictions have not diminished their persistence.

Not surprisingly, I disagree outright with the NPR story you sent. You’re welcome to disagree, but I’ll tell you the basic arguments.

I recently read Murray Rothbard’s book, “America’s Great Depression,” which I think is a very thorough refutation of Milton Friedman’s explanation of the Great Depression. After reading about Hoover’s massive and unending interference in monetary policy, trade policy, labor laws, industry, I’m really not sure how Milton Friedman can claim Hoover didn’t do enough. In fact, during the 1932 presidential campaign, Hoover was accused of being socialist.

It was his “help” which caused the depression. In 1921 the market suffered a bigger proportional crash than in 1929, but president Harding resisted the urging of then-secretary-of-commerce Hoover and didn’t “help.” By the time Hoover convinced him to help the economy recovered. Eight years later Hoover was ready, willing and able to take advange of the crash and institute a bunch of government controls which kept the economy crippled for a decade. FDR’s New Deal was an expansion of Hoover’s policies.

A quick note about the causes of the crash.

The AUSTRIAN BUSINESS CYCLE THEORY is what makes Austrian Economics different from other libertarians, like those of Milton Friedman’s Chicago Monetarist school.

Milton Friedman, like Krugman, Keynes, Marx and most television commentators believe that crashes spring from the bowels of capitalism. This is implied in the NPR article you sent. Freedom doesn’t work. We are asked to believe that all of a sudden, many entrepreneurs, who make a career out of predicting and meeting human desires, make bad predictions.

The Austrian Business Cycle Theory offers an explanation for these clusters of entreupreneurial errors. They are caused by loose monetary policy. Specifically, artificially low interest rates. This, incidentally, is exactly what Krugman called for when he suggested Greenspan create a housing bubble.

Monetary expansion by both banks and government in the 1920s caused the 1929 crash. Monetary expansion in the 90’s caused the internet bubble, then the 2001 crash, which was papered over by more monetary expansion i.e. the housing bubble. It is government, not free markets causing these crashes.

The worst thing that can come of this crisis is the condemnation of economic freedom.

Him:

Roman,

I stand corrected. You are right. And I admit that you have piqued my interest in Rothbard’s book, as long as it is not more right wing revisionist history. It sounds like it is not.

But “Waterloo” for Krugman sounds a bit overly dramatic to me.

The fact of the matter is that I believe in the “Tragedy of the Commons”. And i apply this to economics, the market as well as the environment. Man is by nature greedy. That is not in itself a bad thing. And enlightened self-interest is a positive outgrowth of that but that is not always what happens when markets are deregulated and self serving politicians are bought of by big monied interests. . I believe we need government to do certain things like enforce child labor laws, environmental and health standards, taxes to fund the military, interstate highways, etc. How much control and intervention is open to debate the democratic process.

***

Stay tuned for a discussion of child labor laws from the Austrian perspective. . . .

New All-Time Lows for Both CBS & ABC Evening Newscasts

“Breaking: TVNewser has learned the CBS Evening News has once again set an all-time low last week with 4.89 million Total Viewers and 1.42 million A25-54 viewers. But it was also the lowest (since records began in the 1991-’92 season) for ABC’s World News with Charles Gibson. The Gibson program drew 6.42 million Total Viewers and 1.77 million A25-54 viewers.” (Read more from mediabistro.com)

ABCNNBBCBS: “Quick! Find anchor women with bigger boobs and shorter skirts!”

truth matters . . .

‘Craven bumlicking ass-goblin’ calls Hank Paulson a national hero

Fantastic catch by trueslant.com:

“

By Evan Newmark

Hank Paulson is a national hero.

I said it last October and I’m sticking by it. And now, there’s actual evidence to back me up. The TARP bailout worked. The Wall Street crisis is over.

via Mean Street: It’s Time to Enshrine Hank Paulson as National Hero – Deal Journal – WSJ.

So here’s the letter I wrote to the Wall Street Journal after reading Evan Newmark’s paean to Hank Paulson last week:

Dear WSJ,

Just out of curiosity — did Evan Newmark ever work for Goldman, Sachs? And if the answer to the question is yes, don’t you think that might have been a good fact to disclose before he fellated Hank Paulson in his “Mean Street” column?

Sincerely,
Matt Taibbi

I didn’t get an answer, which I guess is not surprising. But in the interim I found out that Newmark did, indeed, work for Goldman. I find it funny that a business journalist has to disclose if he’s invested in this or that stock, or short this or that security, before a newspaper will allow him to have an opinion about anything even distantly related to that company — but you don’t need to disclose anything if all you’re doing is kissing your former boss’s ass.

Can you imagine what a craven, bumlicking ass-goblin you’d have to be to get a job working for the Wall Street Journal, not mention up front that you used to be a Goldman, Sachs managing director, and then write a lengthy article calling your former boss a ‘national hero’?”