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The Times' Rorshach Geithner Story
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Sinking Animal Spirits
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Be Your Own Counterfeiter
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Being Tim Geithner
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Notes From a Press Conference Naif
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What Good is the News?
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Stressful Enough
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Not Regretting the Pound
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Introducing the New Ford Squeeze
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Non-Economic Questions of the Day
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The Stress Test Blind Alley
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Recovery Without Rebalancing
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TV vs Blogs, Jargon Edition
The lack of interactivity on television seems to be haunting Bloomberg. Paul Kedrosky is watching TV:
Bloomberg TV is apparently watching Fox Business News. The same way that Fox is making a point of trying to force guests and host to avoid biz jargon, or at least define it, in the last few minutes I have seen a Bloomberg host ask a guest to explain backwardation, contango, and a steepening yield curve.
It's all good, but the guests should be warned beforehand. Both guests looked like they had been unexpectedly asked why they breathe regularly.
Note that Kedrosky himself, writing in an interactive medium (a blog) feels no need to define these terms. Maybe he's just trying to make his readers feel smart, a la Tyler Cowen, but in fact he knows full well that if anybody wants to know what any of these terms means, they're by definition online, if they're reading his blog, and it's the work of seconds to find out. Someone watching TV, by contrast, has no easy way of remembering which is which when it comes to backwardation and contango, which puts Bloomberg TV in an impossible situation. Do they not define the terms, and risk confusing their viewers, or do they take time to define the terms, and risk patronising them?
