Wall Street’s Christmas-in-July revelry proved short-lived when it was reported on Friday that the U.S. economy had created just 18,000 non-farm jobs in June. Recall that a day earlier, speculators goosed the Dow Industrials more than 200 points above the previous day’s lows on word of a faint blip in retail sales and a drop in jobless claims. Not much to celebrate, really, but it was all the mainstream media (MSM) needed to cheerlead the officially sanctioned story of a strengthening U.S. economy. Alas, as the week drew to a close, traders sank back into apparent despair, evidently persuaded by the news of the moment that Thursday’s statistical oasis had been but a mirage. For their part, the news media showed no discernible embarrassment over their ongoing, schizophrenic coverage of the economy’s supposed ups and downs. When will they cop to the fact that regardless of whether stocks are rising or falling, the economy is down-and-out and likely to remain so for as long as the government acts out the fable of a Keynesian recovery?
We wonder whether the financial press is even capable of understanding that it’s not the news that causes stocks to rise and fall, but cyclical forces that lie beyond our understanding. Moreover, it is the movement up or down of stocks that colors our perception of news rather than the other way around. Thus, on days when the broad averages have rallied on “bad” news, the network anchors will assert that “investors,” prescient and wise as ever, have looked beyond the negatives to glimpse sunshine on the horizon. Similarly, when stocks fall on “good” news – say, a downtick in unemployment — the mainstream media (MSM) will play down the statistic and magnify another that seems more simplistically compatible with falling stocks.
Obama’s Fate
Overall, economic coverage by the MSM has been heavily skewed toward the positive, notwithstanding the fact that reporters continually refer to these “hard times” and “The Great Recession.” As we pointed out here earlier, the news media’s use of the term “Great Recession” is a disingenuous way of acknowledging that no matter how rosy the government’s statistics, the economy still stinks. The American public already knows this – knows, in fact, that however many trillions of dollars the government has borrowed trying to induce a recovery, that the effort has failed. Instead of reporting on this simple fact — a fact that is by now obvious to everyone — the MSM prefers to base its coverage of the economy almost solely on what the stock market has done on a given day or week. The result is that we read of a recovery that is weakening on Tuesday, strengthening on Wednesday and Thursday, and faltering on Friday. What poppycock! In fact, outside of Wall Street, the economy has been sinking for years and can only continue to sink as the government borrows us into servitude. Obama is fated to lose by a landslide because of this. When it happens, of course, the news media will act surprised.
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It has been a while since I have taken this opportunity. As a Wharton grad, ex emmercial banker, it seems to me that the stock market goes up if Goldman Sachs, now a “commercial bank” ala Tarp funds and qualification over a weekend to obtain that “free” money, wants it to. What is missed is that the CEO psychopaths who ship America’s jobs to the lowest cost labor, maybe, COMMUNIST China, and will do so to COMMUNIST N. Korea, if the price is right, the governors who shill for them, and who now are engaging prison labor in this country after firing public employees, are emasculating every bit of what could bring our economy back. “Deficit talks” after their responsibility ala Reagan, Bush 1, and Bush 2 who are responsible for 1/3 of all the deficit, period, were all Republican, and self-avowed “conservatives.” There are none so blind as those who will not see. As with most of the financial world in this country, you misdirect, mislead, and miss the point. Your “conservatives” have won the right to retrograde the tax code, ensure that the ultra rich keep every bit of their inherited wealth, start wars whenever your paranoia or greed kicks in. So, we have no FDR to kick us back to reality, we forget Maynard Keynes who argued that in good times we need to pay down debt (GW Bush, that MBA told us we had to give it back in tax breaks, Randian acolyte Greenspan, the “banker” agreed). I can only believe that like the speaker who speaks over his opponent bcuase he’s afraid the argument will be over if he let’s his opponent be heard, you continue to repeat the mantra, of government is inept. Fact is, most are self-interested, America be damned. Thank you