CNBC’s Liesman rocks Bowles-Simpson interview

Business Insider’s Joe Weisenthal liked the way CNBC chief economics correspondent Steve Liesman handled his interview on Thursday with Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson.

Weisenthal writes, “Steve Liesman is CNBC’s top-notch economics reporter, who frequently gets flak from Rick Santelli and the internet, because he doesn’t knee-jerk hate the Fed, and buy into a lot of popular nonsense.

“And it’s because Liesman is such a smart guy that he performed the best Simpson-Bowles interview of anyone yet.

“See usually, when Bowles and Simpson appear somewhere, they’re mostly given softballs that accept the premise of their charge, that the biggest crisis in the economy is the national debt, and that their ‘pox on both their houses’ message is right on. Nobody ever seems to question whether it makes sense for Washington to be spending so much time talking about deficit reduction at a time of 7.8% unemployment and ultra-low borrowing costs.

“And yet! That’s exactly what Liesman did.”