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The latest piece of evidence buttressing the "finance journalists are dopey pricks" hypothesis, comes from none other than the GOP WMD-hype echo chamber - the New York Times (the home of plagiarist Jayson Blair, and the Republican party shill and Ahmed Chalabi's presstitute Judith Miller). It styles itself the "paper of record"... which I take to mean that they make a record number of clangers.
The article in question is one that I read just now, violating my oft-cited disdain for crap written by dumbasses who think that so long as something "scans" and sounds right, it must be OK to put in print. As usual, the merest hint of a room-temperature IQ makes the whole shibboleth fall apart.
Today's "brainless dickhead" award goes to Mark Landler, who wrote a piece of crap abut how Euro-zone growth was being hampered by - get this - high oil prices.
Well I've got news for you, Mark Landler - learn to convert oil prices into the appropriate currency before you start typing about how high they've got.
See, oil prices in Euros are not up anywhere near as much as oil prices in USD. I will grant that USD-oil prices have risen dramatically since my "SuperTrade 2002" that called for
- Long oil
- Long Gold
- Long Euro and
- Short S&P
Oil actually rose from $19.06 to well over $50. One thing you can be sure of - this dickhead (Lander) would not have been telling everyone that it was a solid buy.
Anyway... the compensating rise in the Euro (from about $0.86 to well above $1.28) has offset a good deal of that rise. In Euro terms, oil is up relatively managably over the three year period (22% annualised, which is a lot, but certainly much more manageably than the 40% annualised gain in the USD price) - which is most of the reason that a bunch of countries are thinking seriously of moving their oil pricing into euros.
What is it about journalism that requires a genuinely shallow grasp of everything? There are exceptions - Gretchen Morgenstern is a swan among the toads at the NYT (intellectually I mean - I have no idea what she looks like), and there are a few others.
