Month: June 2003

Why do you guys keep hyping economic-data releases hours after they come out? Don’t you know that the markets discount this kind of information within seconds? Of course you know it, so stop pretending that everyone else doesn’t. Yes, I realize the other financial-news networks do the same thing that you do, but that’s because they’re clueless too.

I know that this goes against journalistic conventional wisdom, but if you want to stand out in a way that gets you more viewers, you might consider doing things that your competitors don’t do. More interviews with economists and business analysts would be fine, but your over reliance on journo talking heads promoting the story of the day and interpreting economic news they don’t understand doesn’t cut it. Neither does your heavy use of talking-head conventional interpretations of political news. What might make you worth watching would be a few simple innovations, like a listing of the day’s economic releases in tabular or graphical form comparing them to previous stats. (Hint: we don’t care what the numbers are so much as how they compare to expectations, how the markets react, and whether there are obvious trends.) And would it kill you to time stamp your headlines, so that anyone could see at a glance if that latest news item is two minutes or two hours old?

Thanks.

P.S. And while you’re at it, maybe you should drop the car reviews, golf reviews, coverage of the CNBC annual barbecue, etc., etc. I can get that kind of stuff a lot more efficiently by browsing the WSJ “Personal Journal” section when I’m in the john.

Don Luskin links to this warning about long-term interest rates.

The Fed, as the Times article points out, is plainly determined that this time nothing will get in the way (as 9/11 and Enron did in the recent past) of economic recovery. Therefore the Fed has been cutting rates and expanding the money supply. The desired results are economic expansion, which is already occurring, and a stock-market rally, which seems to be happening in fits and starts. But costs of the Fed’s manipulation include a weaker dollar, and an overvalued bond market that will collapse once it becomes clear that the Fed has finished cutting rates. Buy puts.

Brian Wesbury hit the nail on the head with his Op-Ed piece in the Wall Street Journal today (Monday June 23). I would provide a link, however the filthy capitalist pigs at the Journal require you to be a subscriber to view. (When the revolution comes, the Journal’s offices will certainly be converted to headquarters for the New Propaganda Daily). The main theme of his editorial is that the problem with this economy lies not in prevailing interest rates, and will not be solved through more cutting of said rates, rather the lack of velocity of money flow is what holds us back. Citing Irving Fisher’s brilliantly simple formula of (M)Money X (V)Velocity = (P)Price X (Q)Quantity , we can see that the Fed gets the most bang for its buck by exerting influence on V. I will let Mr. Wesbury’s piece speak for itself on how to do just that.
For an alternative viewpoint, visit my friend Andrew Strasmann’s site, which is updated daily with econ-o-pinion as well as hockey commentary.

Update: Here is the link to Brian Wesbury’s article. Since they obviously allow GKST to republish, I take back what I said about The Journal.

Somebody (Instapundit?) linked to this piece by David Gelernter, who has some interesting ideas about online newspapers. Gelernter thinks they could be radically improved by introduction of a cardfile-like user interface that he describes in detail. He also links to Scopeware, a company he’s involved with that develops and markets UI software of the type he discusses.

The Scopeware UI paradigm seems like a natural. It also looks likes an evolutionary improvement on the UI designs we use in blogs. (Which raises a question of why Gelernter didn’t mention blogs as precursors and prototypes for the new newspaper paradigm he envisions.)

I’m eager to see if Gelernter’s UI comes eventually to be used by online newspapers, but I’d be more interested in seeing it applied to blogs right now. Blogging software such as Movable Type already makes it easy to aggregate data feeds, search posts and categorize them by theme — features Gelernter says are important (and they are, though most bloggers fail to make efficient use of them). How hard would it be to create a MT main index template and style sheet to display posts as an over-the-horizon cascade of index cards in the way Gelernter suggests? Not very, I’d bet. Maybe someone will do it, and maybe then, if it becomes a popular blog UI, newspapers will consider using it. I doubt the newspapers will be the first to introduce it, though.

Jonathan sent me this, and this essay by Thomas Sowell, on the 20th anniversary of the death of Eric Hoffer. I read Hoffer’s book The True Believer a few weeks after 9/11, based on an essay in the WSJ. I’d had a copy on the shelf for years but never gotten to it. Hoffer put Catholicism and Nazism in the same category — delusional beliefs for the weak. Ouch. So wrong for so many reasons. A silent prayer for the repose of his manifestly well-intentioned soul is an appropriate response, which I am happy to provide and repeat as I type this. But this type of thing happens throughout the book, which is a mix of clever and wise insights commingled with historical and factual error and over-generalization. It makes the book a lot weaker than it ought to be. Hoffer was trying to do too much. Instead of just describing the membership of modern mass political movements, which he understood pretty well, he tried to write a book which spanned all of history. And he did not know enough of all of history to do that very well.

Sowell’s affection for Hoffer seems to turn mainly on Hoffer’s uncompromising stand against the stupidities of the day which were rampant in the 1960s, at least as much as on the quality of Hoffer’s books. I have read almost everything by Sowell, who is usually very solid. His more recent books are not as good as his earlier, meatier work. For example, Knowledge and Decisions is excellent. (I just noticed that my copy seems to have disappeared … . All is not always orderly here at Fortress Lex.) Sowell’s books are better than his punditry, which can occasionally be superficial. All in all, Sowell is a better writer and thinker than Hoffer was, at least based on my sampling.