The financial media’s issue: Making everything a problem for the little guy

Felix Salmon of Reuters writes that a big problem for the financial media is that it tries to turn every story into a problem for the average person.

Salmon writes, “One of the problems with financial journalism is its rather kludgy attempts to appeal to a general audience. If something bad happens, for instance, it has to be presented as being bad for the little guy. This was a huge problem with the Libor scandal, since anybody with a mortgage or other loan tied to Libor ended up saving money as a result of it being marked too low.

“But don’t underestimate the imagination of the financial press. For instance, what if there was a New York county which put on Libor-linked interest rate swaps to hedge its bond issuance? In that case, if Libor was understated, then the hedges would have paid out less money than they should have done — and presto, the Libor scandal is directly responsible for municipal layoffs and cuts in “programs for some of the needy”.

“This is all a bit silly. The Libor understatements actually brought it closer to prevailing interest rates; the fudging basically just served to minimize the degree to which the unsecured credit risk of international banks was embedded in the rate. And in any case, the whole point of a hedge is that it offsets risks elsewhere: it’s intellectually dishonest to talk about losses on the hedge without talking about the lower rates that the municipality was paying on its debt program as a whole.

“We’re seeing the same thing with the fiasco at Knight Capital, where a highly-sophisticated high-frequency stock-trading shop lost an enormous amount of money in a very small amount of time, and small investors lost absolutely nothing. On the grounds that we can’t present this as news without somehow determining that it’s bad for the little guy, it took no time at all for grandees to weigh in explaining why this really was bad for the little guy after all, and/or demonstrates the need for strong new regulation, in order to protect, um, someone, or something. It’s never really spelled out.”

Read more here.