Friday, December 30, 2005
The non-stop wrongness of the New York Times
On April 2, 2005, the Grey Lady complained at length about the Bush administration's economic policies, and declared "the dollar is heading down, no matter what." Oh, really? Behold a table of the dollar's performance this year against the Euro, its only real competition as a reserve currency. The vertical red line is at the beginning of April, the date of the Times' prediction:
Oops.
On April 16, 2005, the Times ran a story declaring that "stocks plunge to lowest point since election," suggesting again that short-term changes in the financial markets were the fault of the Bush administration. What's happened since then?
Oops, again. With this kind of trading saavy, it shouldn't surprise us that the editors of the New York Times prefer writing about financial markets than investing their money in them.
If the declines in the dollar and the stock market early in the year were the fault of the Bush administration, to what shall we attribute the rallies in both since then? Obviously, it is idiotic to ascribe any one cause to any one movement in a complex system such as the financial markets. The amazing thing is that the editors of the Times do so with a straight face all the time, without the slightest concern that they predicate both their predictions and their conclusions on an absurd premise.
2 Comments:
By 
Cassandra, at
Fri Dec 30, 11:56:00 AM:
Heh. What do you expect from the Papir of Record?
When they have the effrontery to continue to put Paul Krugman on their Op-Ed pages after he has been tiresomely, unrelentingly wrong, day after day after day, year after year.... *sigh*.
It got to the point where it wasn't even sporting to mock him anymore and even I had to stop. Which was a pity, because he so richly deserved it.
I have always wondered whether part of the rationale behind the whole TimeSelect deal was that they really don't WANT people reading their Op-Eds anymore. I think it was getting embarrassing for them. Limiting their audience to only those who wanted to read that dreck badly enough to PAY for it began to seem desireable.
By Cassandra, at
Fri Dec 30, 11:58:00 AM:
Remember that guy who was arguing that al Qaeda "had us right where he wanted us"?
That a major objective of the war was to bleed us dry?
I wonder what he has to say now?
