Economics of Contempt

Robert Teitelman of The Deal has a magnificent post on financial journalism in the credit crisis. It's long, but well worth it. Here's a taste:

Finance is a complex, nonlinear system, full of noise, chaos, complexity and ambiguity. It's defined by all the waywardness of human psychology. That's what makes it such a fascinating phenomenon to observe and to write about (and also why risk management may be an oxymoron). But if investment professionals and regulators fail again and again to master its perturbations, as academic studies have always shown, then why on this green earth would a financial journalist succeed at predicting the future? Not to understand that suggests either a utopian naiveté about journalism and the markets or an agenda that has nothing to do with either one of them. It also suggests the kind of wishful thinking that will lead to the next inflation of overheated expectations.