Hey, looks who attacking me now! A reader sent me this from the Editorial Board of Investors Business Daily — I guess I must have touched hit a nerve.
And even better, lil’ ole me is now described as a member of the “media elite:”
No Lie — Credit Crisis Was Fault Of Gov’t, Not Business
The media elite are worried the false narrative they’ve crafted about Wall Street causing the crisis is starting to crumble. Instead of fessing up, they blame us.
‘One group has been especially vocal about shaping a new narrative of the credit crisis and economic collapse,” economic pundit Barry Ritholtz wrote in the Washington Post. He condemned this rogue element for having the temerity to blame Washington. “These people are engaged in an active campaign to rewrite history,” he complained. “They are winning.” Ritholtz throws IBD in that camp, citing on his blog our past editorials plus a recent front-page article documenting how banks came under siege by regulators to cut standards and lend more to boost minority homeownership in the crisis run-up.
Ritholtz calls this the “Big Lie.” But it is Ritholtz who is intellectually dishonest. In trying to refute government’s central role in the mess, he recites the same shopworn arguments about “unregulated financial instrument(s)” and “Wall Street bundling mortgages.”
–IBD
Despite the enormous respect I had for William O’Neil as a market analyst, I stopped reading IBD a decade ago. Their editorial policy was so off the rails that it made me wonder if I could trust their reportage.
Anytime you folks at IBD would like to have a live, fair, public debate moderated by neutral judges, let me know. I’d be happy to participate in a discussion about this issue.
Chris Whalen and Josh Rosner have suggested putting together a causes of the crisis debate (I sarcastically described it as flat earth loons versus a data driven analysis), but there is merit in that idea.
On my squad I select Bill Black and Mike Konczal, with a research team of Yves Smith, David Min, William Cohan and Janet Tavakoli. I am sure there are more folks to add to this, but that’s the debate squad I would go with.
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