Friday, October 07, 2011

Dueling Economists on Bloomberg

Earlier this week I caught about ten minutes of dueling economists on Tom Keene's noontime Bloomberg program. One was Andrew Tilton, and the other was Michael Darda. The two were starkly different.

What struck me was that Tilton had this 'head down, read the numbers' sort of attitude, which led him to make assorted ludicrously optimistic statements. Then, again, he works for Goldman, which probably doesn't want to spook markets while their and their customers' money is long.

Darda, on the other hand, made sensible comments about real world economic events. He wasn't totally candid, but at least he gave reasonable weight to qualitative events occurring in Europe and various debt markets.

Sadly, Keene sat there and, as I've learned he often does, played up to both guests as if they offered unalloyed wisdom. I suppose he was practicing the usual on-air media nonsense of never asking tough questions of a guest because they might not return if he did.

Thus, it was a mostly wasted ten minutes of my time.

2 comments:

Gus Bennett said...

Looking forward to read your comment about 60-minutes' visit with a jovial Jeffrey Immelt.

C Neul said...

Sorry to disappoint- I don't watch the very liberal CBS. Maybe sports on occasion. But certainly not any editorial content, which, for CBS and NBC, includes their so-called news hours.

Perhaps I'll see a recap of it on a Fox News program?

-CN