economonkey

(or “Stop talking us into a recession!”)

In recent months I have read, in newspapers and online forums, and heard, from some genuinely interested people and a few incurable optimists, the proposition that the problems in the financial system are somehow due to ’scare-mongering’ in the press. Depending on your bull/bear persona, it’s easy to agree or disagree with this proposition without actually thinking too much about what it means.

So let’s take a step back and consider the fundamentals. First, the mass media obviously influences public opinion. There can be no doubt about that. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t exist; it would have no political role and no advertisers would be interested in paying to be a part of it. Television and newspapers have finely-honed psychological hooks, and although they’re suffering because of the accessibility of more credible information on the Internet, they know how to drag their readers in with a good, emotional (but seemingly rational) headline and story.

As we know from experience, when every newspaper and television channel is exhorting people to buy into the housing pyramid scam (sorry, market) because ‘house prices only go up’, and using fear and greed to push that message home, it has an effect; first on the psychology of the public and then on the market pricing.

Put two economists in a room together and you’ll get three different opinions on the state and future direction of the economy. Surely economics, the dismal ’science’, could learn something from one of the true sciences, such as physics?

Certainly there have been efforts to do so, particularly among large investment banks and hedge funds, who have used quantitative analysis tools running on powerful computer systems to try to tease out the signals from the noise of price movements, taking into account thousands of different influences from interest rates to tax variations, asset prices to currency exchange rates and much more, all on the basis that there is some underlying predictability, some ‘law’ that governs price movement.

Which makes it all the more surprising that so many of them got it so spectacularly wrong; to the tune of $188 billion and counting. Why?