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[randomness]

This is a fantastic time to practice saying the words "I don't know". Pity the pundits' incentives are aligned in a way that strongly discourages them from saying those three words.

Cassandra Does Tokyo rants:

Pundit Rage
There is always a bull market somewhere so goes the old saw. Despite the sorry state of markets far and wide, and even sorrier state of the real economy that is lagging the former, a week of traveling, planes, trains, and hotels with attendant over-indulgence in popular newspapers, television and radio has revealed the latest rip-roaring and snorting bull-market: simple-minded interviewers wheeling out pedestrian interviewees from any remotely-related tangential financial discipline - most with paltry knowledge and understanding of the current economic crisis, economic history, and financial markets but all who are recriminating, pontificating, moralizing, wagging fingers, o denying and defending in a blind-leading-the-blind retributional media-equivalent of road-rage. If ever there were a moment to turn off the sound on the stupid-box, change the radio station to the local university's 24-hour indie music station, use the newsprint (FT excepted) for kindling or bog-roll (a Daily Mail recession-fighting tip?!?), limit one's consumption to the coterie of fine balanced and thoughtful blogs, or just read a book, preferably one written more than a hundred years ago, now is precisely the moment to do so. And like most bull-markets, this one too will eventually fall-in on itself out of internal fatigue, or perhaps more, optimistically through a mass-epiphany by their consumers that such simplified uninformed demagogic treatment is one of the reasons why we are here in the first place.