Friday, September 18, 2009
Are Financial Blogs Trustworthy?
The talking heads say that financial blogs aren’t trustworthy.
But the whole debate about blogs versus mainstream media is nonsense.
In fact, many of the world’s top PhD economics professors and financial advisors have their own blogs. For example (in no particular order):
And the conclusions of economists who don’t have their own blogs are collected by other bloggers and on YouTube videos. For example, this blog rounds up everything Marc Faber says.
And you’ve got blogs like Zero Hedge that break stories about Goldman and high-frequency trading months before the mainstream media. And insightful commentators like Barry Ritholtz and Mish and many others.
So what is “news”? What the talking heads choose to cover? Or what various leading experts are saying - and oftentimes heatedly debating one against the other - on their blogs?
I would argue that mainstream newspapers haven’t just lost readers because of the Internet as an abstract new medium, but that they lost readers because they became - with some exceptions - nothing but official stenographers for the powers-that-be. No wonder people have lost all faith in them.
Indeed, as of February, only 5% of the pundits discussing various government bailout plans on cable news shows are real economists. Why not hear what real economists and financial experts say?
To the extent that blogs offer actual news and the mainstream media does not, the latter will continue to lose eyeballs and ad revenues to the former.
Of course, many financial blogs are not very good. The trick is to learn which are trustworthy and accurate.
And this is not to imply that all mainstream commentators are short on facts. Some are really good. Once again, the trick is find the good ones.
5 comments:
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Please see and evaluate this:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.deepcapture.com/
It's time to blow a little smoke GW. Your blog is a daily read for me. Always a wealth of information on many sides of the topic. You have lead me to sites and people I did not follow on a regular basis and have broadened my view a lot. I link to your blog often in my own blog as your site is often in the lead on a story. Thanks for your effort and to your wife for putting up with your dedication. The Tiger
ReplyDeleteOf course the blogs are not trustworthy because, well, they are not corporately owned.
ReplyDeleteI kinda think that the blogs, especially the type that you mentioned, let us mere mortals into the conversations that had been going on in academia and other power circles. Those conversations used to only be available in arcane scholarly journals or the parties and clubs that the elite frequented. The MSM can't provide that conversation. It can only provide a one way, one perspective conversation. That is why the MSM is failing.
ReplyDeletemainstream media?> - they are increasingly out of touch with the real mainstream - their "independence" has been co-opted by their corporate masters whose message serves their own self-interest rather than the greater good.
ReplyDeleteas for noteworthy economists, uou left out Steve Keen, an Oz economist who called this train wreck well before it happened.
http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/
imo, he ranks ahead of Roubini & Krugman, tho doesn't get near the media attention in the US that those two do.