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Financial Crisis Coverage

By Anonymous

Brad DeLong mocks the Washington Post for thinking that it has the ability to provide "authoritative" coverage of an event like the financial crisis:

[W]hen an episode like the financial crisis hits, nobody even half-informed with even half a brain looks to the Post for "authoritative" coverage. To the Financial Times, the Economist, and the news pages of the Wall Street Journal; to Calculated Risk, Marginal Revolution, Econbrowser, Economists View, Naked Capitalism, and The Big Picture; to John Berry, Paul Krugman, and Larry Summers. But not to the Post. Not for "authoritative" coverage. The presumption has to be that the Post's reporters are--like Neil Irwin last Wednesday--warping the story to please their sources, or simply out of their depth. The Washington Post crashed and burned long ago.

DeLong is, of course, right: on financial markets coverage, the Washington Post belongs at the kids' table. It has no one, at all, with the requisite intelligence and knowledge of financial markets. When no one at the newspaper actually understands what's going on right now in the financial markets, it's hard to provide "authoritative" coverage of the financial crisis.

Where should people turn for truly authoritative coverage of the financial crisis? The Financial Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and Reuters. If you're getting your news on the financial crisis from anywhere else, then you're not actually following the financial crisis.

Prior to this week (in which an associate spelled me as the resident 18-hour-a-day guy at the investment house, allowing me to rest up by working mere 10-hour days for a week!), the only times since the financial crisis started that I've been to read any of the econoblogs was when I was at the airport, so I don't really know who's been providing the best commentary. And unfortunately, on Monday it's once more into the breach, for me. Stack of Credit Derivative Master Agreements, here I come!

Full post as published by Economics of Contempt on October 19, 2008 (boomark / email).