It is not often that the world wakes up to the same headlines right around the globe. But that is what happened last week when the news media told the story of the international economic system going into a tailspin.
The collapse of investment banks and a huge global insurance company had media outlets using terms like “Wall Street meltdown”, “an economic 9/11″, even the “end of capitalism”…
To hear much of the global media tell it the economic crash blindsided the world, including banks, regulators and even those who had been reporting the financial world to the public.
“I don’t think anyone saw this coming, least of all the financial press,” Ryan Chittum from the Columbia Journalism Review, says. “Should financial journalists be fortune tellers? No. But should they have done a better job of reporting that the structure of Wall Street was such that something like could have happened and clearly the answer is yes…”
What the media seem to have been doing wrong according to Andrew Palmer, the Economist’s banking correspondent, is not being sceptical enough during the period of sustained economic growth…The media’s obsession with business also plays a part. Reporting on the triumphs of the so-called the titans of Wall Street sells more papers and attracts more viewers than stories of ordinary people having their homes repossessed.
“With business magazines such as Fortunes, Forbes, there is a kind of cult of the CEO I think,” Chittum says. “It sells magazines when you have the triumphant titan of business on the cover with his latest plan to conquer industry.
Lousy journalism doesn’t make for a Free Press or an informed populace.
#61 Stu
That’s the silliest argument I’ve ever heard. And Mr. Fusion is no better.
I think I pretty much agree with Bring on New War!…
unlimited growth is a contradiction in terms. The whole concept of growth implies some sort of maturity down the track, and there is no such thing as a mature economy. Real growth in an economy can only proceed while the number of people participating in it is growing at the same rate.
Growth is not limited only by the finite nature of resources. A manufacturing-based economy will stagnate when the market for the manufactured goods becomes saturated and people stop buying them. To prevent this, savvy manufacturers will look for ways to create new demand for their old products (perhaps by repackaging them and passing them off as “new”) or promoting newly developed products which nobody asked for, and which will require a demand to be artificially generated.
Does this sound familiar? As an example of this, Microsoft gives us Vista, which nobody wanted; XP was doing the job just fine, but Microsoft’s business model requires a new Operating System to be released at least every 5 years. So they have to hype it up and incorporate new “features” to make people think it’s really something new and they have to have it.
The media are either willing participants or unknowing pawns in this fabricated universe which is filling our world up with useless junk at an alarming rate. This is the “growth” everybody is talking about.
So, we all go on buying ever-increasing amounts of shiny toys, as fast as China can produce them, while the sellers pocket most of the huge drop in production costs since they sent all the manufacturing offshore; everybody seems very happy, but it is obvious that none of this is sustainable. China becomes more and more wealthy, until they get bored with producing toys for the West and decide to buy it instead, which they could just about do right now. Why doesn’t anybody seem to be worried about this? It’s got to happen sooner or later.
What we’re seeing now might be the beginning of the Big One, the mother of all economic collapses, the onset of Mad Max. If nobody saw it coming, it’s simply because we’re all living in the same fool’s paradise.