Developing an entirely unjustifiable superiority complex.
Up until about midway through last year, I'd always had a reasonable sort of acceptance of financial pundits. They mostly said things would go on the same way forever, and credit could just increase to match, and even though my failing Earth logic disagreed with these views as a long-term bet, stuff mostly kept going up in price or getting cheaper as appropriate, so y'know, I figured the blokes with economics degrees and that sort of thing knew what they were talking about.

Plus their columns were always buried away deep within a paper's online presence about 95 clicks from the main page, so you didn't see many of them anyway.

Then things got a little bit less stable. And every single blathering by an economic commentator or pundit is front-page or near front-page news.

Crikey. I don't think I've ever seen a more hopeless rain of bastards actually manage to get their dribblings in print. They all seem to ping-pong wildly between "worst crisis EVAR!" and "recovery by Tuesday" and generally display about as much grip on what's going on as I have on the Lebanese language.

What is genuinely depressing is that there are potentially people reading newspapers who actually trust and believe this extended family of economic Chuckle brothers. And right now are probably spending all their savings on building a gigantic bunker for the end of capitalism as we know it, except on alternate Wednesdays when we have a "recovery is just around the corner" party.

Honestly. If you can't create a rational, sane and non-sensationalist piece, then just slap together an article saying, "I don't know" and chuck a few graphs at the bottom of it, please?
(Timberwolf, Fri 23 Jan 2009, 0:20, Reply)