Wednesday, 13 April 2011

Ground-hog Governor

I've been listening to the Bank of England quarterly inflation press conference for many years now, and it never fails to amuse just how many times Mervyn King can give in effect the same answer to everyone's various questions.  The fault lies not with Mr King, who I think does a decent job at these conferences, but the dolts in the press corps, who unfailingly ask the same badly-informed populist questions, again and again and again.  I have no idea why they do it, since they are by and large the same set of journalists who turn up each time.  Particularly at fault are the popular national newspaper economics journalists and their television colleagues (Sky, BBC, Channel 4, ITV) and the markets  journalists (Bloomberg, Reuters, Dow Jones).  The Economist journalists usually perform better.

They really ought to be ashamed of their performance.  Perhaps someone ought to edit out a chronological history, for each journalist, of the set of questions and King's responses directly to them, over the last 5 years.  Maybe then they'd get it.

1 comment:

  1. Yet another ground hog day for Mervyn King. Those business and economics journalists who show up ought to be embarrassed by their collective performance.

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