Barron's cover story missed the boat

TheStreet.com’s Marek Fuchs has plenty of issues with this weekend’s cover story in Barron’s on Harvard professor Niall Ferguson — primarily the premise of the entire thing.

Fuchs wrote, “As Ferguson sees it, the news pages are filled with bad news and the business pages with good. This comes right after news pages spent two weeks filled with false predictions of ultimate doom coming from a correction in the Asian markets and long-anticipated trouble for subprime lenders. For years, I thought a housing crush was coming. But if I had to read one more article about the bubble bursting, I’d scream.

“The point, as any Business Press Maven loyalist knows, is that the business media are either too negative or too positive. Their problem is always overreaction and wrong reactions, never one reaction.

“Ferguson also draws a fictional parallel between now and 1880-1914, calling both periods eras of globalization. True, there were more dealings between countries in 1880-1914 than there had been in the past. But, uh, my grandfather came to America during that time riding steerage in a cattle boat. That era of globalization was due to have a few more growing pains and a little less upside than this one.”

Read more here.