The above four photos about sums up the nature of the financial press in a nutshell – the greater the sensationalism and inaccuracies in financial reporting, the more likely one is to be provided with a massive platform to reach millions of viewers and the more frequently the media will seek to bring you on their shows as an “expert”. We only need to glance at the four photos below to conclude that Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, one of the most quoted talking heads in the bitcoin game after being anointed by the press as a bitcoin “expert”, has the predictive accuracy of a six-year old child that doesn’t know anything about cryptorcurrencies.
To start 2018, he predicted that bitcoin would rise to $25,000 at some point that year. Instead, it closed at about $3,750. Later in 2018, as his $25,000 prediction went south rapidly, Mr. Lee predicted that bitcoin would reach $11,500 by mid-year. Instead, it plummeted to $7,500. Having failed with two miserable bitcoin price predictions in 2018, Mr. Lee predicted in mid-2019 that bitcoin would finally find its mojo and soar to $40,000 in a few months. Instead, bitcoin traded within a range between about $7,000 to $11,000. Despite being so wildly wrong in all of these predictions, the media infatuation with Tom Lee as a bitcoin “expert” continues and they welcomed him back with open arms this year, whereupon he predicted a $40,000 bitcoin price by the end of next month.
But this practice of the financial media of suppressing information by anyone that is remotely accurate while showering praise and the limelight upon those that are wildly inaccurate and perpetually wrong is not limited to cryptocurrencies. This extends to almost every area of their reporting. They will report perpetually on predictions offered by anointed “experts” about upcoming global recessions in 2020 in various nations without ever exploring why these experts that live in nations with terrible and declining real economic growth rates haven’t been truthful by stating that their nations of residency are already in recession and have only avoided that truthful label because of government and financial industry officials that have deceitfully reconstructed and engineered the manner in which GDP is calculated to pump that stat much higher than reality.
They will never call out Presidents or heads of State like President Donald Trump for inaccurately claiming that unemployment among blacks and Asians reached “record lows” under his watch, as if he were responsible, without investigating how unemployment figures are deceitfully determined and without asking any of the real questions behind such numbers. For example, are apples being compared to apples and are the lower unemployment figures real, as determination of the statistics in the exact same manner over time is necessary to make such a claim? Have lower unemployment figures, even if real, led to a better quality of life among minority groups, because if high paying full-time jobs have been replaced with much lower-paying part-time jobs in achieving a lesser unemployment rate, then the lower unemployment rate is worse for such minority groups.
And there are dozens of more questions to be asked about the above topics to truly determine the accuracy of such claims made by “leaders” and “experts”, which are in general, almost never asked by any members of the mainstream financial press. Unfortunately, even those that question wildly inaccurate claims of massive financial improvement, such as President Trump’s claims above, seem to be motivated more by politics than truth, and tend to focus on relatively insignificant inaccuracies of his claims versus the much more important questions I raised above that are almost never addressed by anyone in the financial press.
Finally, the financial media practice of providing the spotlight to the people that perpetually provide the most inaccurate advice ever, as I stated above, is not relegated to cryptocurrencies. Regarding gold, the financial press has always welcomed back Harry Dent to their television shows, despite Mr. Dent infamously predicting that gold would plummet to $700 an ounce every single year for many consecutive years. And despite being wildly wrong in his calls for years on end, this fact had little bearing on the financial press’s desire to present anyone else to their audience people that had far more credibility than Dent in this subject matter. Every year, they would continue to bring him back so that he could issue another “gold plummeting to $700 an ounce” prediction that would be wildly wrong by year’s end.
One may ask why the financial media has no interest in presenting accurate and fair reporting to us. Though I’m fairly certain I understand the answer to this question, I will leave this last question open-ended and allow you to determine your own conclusion to this question. Many thanks to my patron supporters for continuing to support my content. Visit this link to discover more about patron only exclusive content, including investment analysis and two patron-only long-format podcasts every month.
