Wrong Mistakes

Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism find the Times doing product placement for the finance "industry" and lobs most of the appropriate hand grenades, although she misses the irony of author Adam Davidson claiming that "Wall Street" created credit cards when, in fact, they were imagined in the 1880s by socialist utopian goofball Edward Bellamy for his novel Looking Backwards--to be fair, he imagined something a lot closer to a pre-paid debit card, but still.  As Yves ruefully points out, all of the "innovations" Davidson discovers are antique, if not ancient.  Wall Street invented mortgages?  Well it must've also invented time machines, because mortgages existed in England all the way back in the Plantagenet days.

What is interesting is that Davidson, like most reporters on the money beat--hell, like most reporters on most beats--has but the barest grasp of what the thing he reports on actually is; his Wall Street is just a sort of vague metonym for all things having to do with money; imagine a sports reporter conflating the Nordic combined with the NFL with the NCAA Men's Basketball tournament with Formula One and you get some sense of how these pieces read to a person even marginally interested in the subject; backcheckers are confused with shortstops, and Vince Lombardi bombs down the track with the Jamaican bobsled team, quoting Yogi Berra the whole way.