Remora

Well, Limited Inc is going to try to write a post.
We've been thinking of extending the Bubble concept. We've mentioned the Bush Bubble. But there is another bubble that floated, in the high nineties, that has come down precipitously. That bubble was made of Media hot air. If the stock market does level out into some seventies plateau, one of the reasons will be that the business press, both mainstream and specialized, has done an incredibly poor job of reporting on business in the last ten years. Business mags popped up, got fat, got thin and died, all without questioning or in any way investigating what now appears to be incredibly easy to expose shams in major corporations. We'd like to institute some kind of prize for sheer hot air -- a prize that would go to the most intellectually corrupt reporter. Unfortunately, we don't have any bucks to do this. However, we do have a name: We'd call it the James Glassman prize in misleading reporting, after the author of Dow 36,000 -- a man who is still giving his perky advice from the pages of the Washington Post. Some would argue with this choice of name. Some would rather name it after poor George Gilder, Mr. Telecosm. But G.G. smoked his own dope, as the Enron folks used to say. He went down with his picks.

The field is vast, n'est-ce pas? and it isn't like it has been culled or corrected -- when amnesia takes away the mendacity one published yesterday, so that one can continue to make ridiculous and optimistic statements today, there's no mechanism of natural selection that would finger the unworthy. Yesterday, for example, LI was sitting in a bar. The bar TV was turned to Fox News. Now, Fox TV sit-coms are known for their appeal to the prurient puer, but compared to the intellectual level on display during the news hour, the sit coms are straight from Einstein. The hour lighted on the liberal demon act of the day, California's new standards for car emissions, and a suitable shill from Detroit, disguised as a reporter, was given the spotlight. I mean, this guy was so from Detroit he should have been wearing an SUV chassis. At one point, he made a disparaging remark about Honda's hybrid cars, to the effect that they are losing thousands per unit.
Now, Honda does seem to be losing money, right now, on their hybrids, although the figures are as yet unknown. But the gall of a Detroit shill lecturing Honda, of all companies, was enough to make me spit my vodka tonic all over the place. As everybody knows, GM is moving their mammoths not through quality improvement, but through the game of zero percent financing. They can do this because they have effectively disintermediated from financial institutions that would have refused the gimmick. Eventually, though, GM's financing department is going to have to find a way to lay that rotten egg. Talk about losing money. To lose money trying to craft a new technology is honorable, and in the long run it pays off, if the tech is any good. To lose money essentially trying to bamboozle market share for car types that haven't changed in 10 years is not only dishonorable, but eventually GM will quietly try to make the Government pay for their massive bet. Why, one might ask, does this story not attract Fortune or Forbes or Business 2.0? Because it is a story that GM does not want told. Period.

Tomorrow, if we can, we are going to start our Glassman awards with a look at the reporting on Enron. Enron, it appears, is a bigger story than even we thought a couple of months ago, because some of the effects of it are just starting to kick in globally. Todays stories about the collaboration of the banks in Enron's perpetual, perpetually disguised, deals, is not going to be good news, now that the Fed is figuring out how to cover Citibank for its WorldCom exposure.