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CNBC Demystified
Submitted by Doug Litowitz via TheAlphaPages.com,
CNBC presents a paradox in the hedge fund community.
It plays constantly, but hardly anybody watches it.
The channel mostly functions as white noise emanating from wall-mounted monitors on trading floors and in financial firms.
Given its ubiquity, one might think it was highly regarded.
But traders and portfolio managers treat CNBC with scorn or indifference.
Few rely on CNBC for market information, preferring Bloomberg terminals or proprietary data sources.
The situation resembles George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, where the protagonist Winston Smith tuned out the massive telescreen on his apartment wall that issued endless streams of positive news.
As an experiment, I polled several friends who have a combined 100 years of experience in hedge funds. They couldn’t recall anyone saying, “I just got a game-changing idea on CNBC.” And during rare mentions of the channel, the commenter opines on the female anchors’ attractiveness or the quality of the male anchors’ suits.
According to Nielsen, CNBC commands a market share many multiples of its nearest competitor, Fox Business News, and perhaps a dozen times that of its second competitor, the more elite-minded Bloomberg Television.
This is puzzling. How can something so unpopular be so popular?
The answer is complex, and requires a deep dive to find CNBC’s true purpose.
CNBC is a news show, or in other words, it is supposed to provide content, information, and stock market advice.
By journalistic standards, it falls short of its task.
Interviews feature softball sessions bordering on hero worship. The recent coverage in Davos at the World Economic Forum was shameless. Too often, CNBC accepts a devil’s bargain where they gain access to market leaders in return for tacit agreement to refrain from tough questions.
The ‘experts’ are self-anointed. Their predictions are never back-tested.
And whatever news it provides is already stale to market makers.
The screen is full of dizzying information without meaningful analysis, and commentators never broach broader social issues. A hollow, unconvincing conviviality prevails among its anchors, and whenever the market goes down or a guest becomes bearish, the anchors turn incredulous, brittle, defensive, and dumbfounded.
Last Fall, the anchors turned aggressive on Peter Schiff by forcing him to admit he wrongly predicted that Gold prices would rise, and he had to defend himself by noting that he was correct about predicting the housing crisis while CNBC was busy cheerleading. Exasperated, he said what everyone is thinking: “All you do is parade people who are wrong.”
Judged as a news show that is supposed to report objectively on the economy and the stock market – it is grievously flawed.
But at a deeper level, below consciousness, CNBC serves an indispensible shamanistic function, providing a kind of ideological placebo that calms everyone down by offering a series of comforting myths.
At this, it succeeds wildly.
Recall that the function of a shaman is to give puzzled victims a narrative framework for redemption, a story in which their afflictions can be warded off, and blessings bestowed, if they perform a certain ritual, or appease a demon, or ingest a magical substance. A person who consults a shaman does not seek evidence or back-testing. He wants a comforting myth that casts himself as master of his destiny when things go well, and as a blameless victim of the gods when things go wrong.
CNBC is an electronic shaman for investors.
Even with the sound turned off, it sends the underlying message that a master plan exists and we can find redemption in the markets, that there is a golden thread, a controlling logic to the chaos and indeterminacy around us. When we make money, it is because we have been wise and followed their sage advice. And when we don’t make money, when they fail to predict the next collapse, there will be no one to blame, because it was due to unforeseeable and mysterious forces.
This is what we want to hear.
All of us – from amateur investors to the greatest traders at the best hedge funds – on some unconscious level want to believe this. It is not simply that we want to hear that market indexes are rising; that may or may not be good news depending on one’s positions. Rather, we want to hear that whatever our strategy happens to be, there are well-dressed, positive, cheerful and confident people telling us that destiny is in our hands, and that the dream is within reach.
No one wants to hear that we are throwing hard-earned money to the cruel winds of malevolent and opaque forces, that billions, even trillions, are sloshing around vulnerable to unstable geopolitical and sociological events that defy rationality, or that fortunes can be won or lost because of some freak tragedy.
No one wants to hear that the market is propped up by the Federal Reserve, or that we are irrationally exuberant, or that earnings guidance is low-grade fiction.
We want to be reassured by serious men and women in suits who tell us that events are looking up, that problems are solvable, that the market is rational, that we are scientists, not gamblers.
And most important, we can all be winners if we just listen to their experts on shows like Fast Money and Mad Money. Just as the audience at a magic show suspends disbelief while the magician saws a body in half, the CNBC viewers suspend disbelief about whether the ‘experts’ on the screen were correct yesterday, or the day before, or the month before.
To watch CNBC – even volume off – is to be transported to a world where propitious events are on the horizon, where people are busy, serious, and sober. The people are smiling, boarding planes, presenting charts in glass conference rooms, balancing their portfolios and building their nest eggs.
They are me, I am them, we are all watching CNBC together, and we are all in the know.
It’s a nice place to be. And that should be your first clue that it isn’t real.
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Yeah, I've watched that. What's that asshole's name? Cramer?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXSGV5wEv1o
How can words supposedly not being read, reappear so broadly across society?
Programming a Living
The critters are trying to program life, and that’s not going to work, which should be obvious, but isn’t to those seeking external security for internal insecurity, the majority, which exists in spiritual, intellectual and physical poverty. Once you are in depression, you are in no position to make decisions, logically or emotionally, but you can create a lot of busy work, and call it economic activity, measured as GDP, surprise.
The accountants don’t lead empire ‘modernization’ by accident. Programmers are brought in to take the snapshot they are shown, a rough one at that, and program it to replace certifiably redundant people, with a redundant program. Most programmers are led to believe they are smart, but are simply writing a script, with blanks for decreasing variability, for even more redundant people to fill in, exactly what the accounting firms want, to increase the efficiency of redundancy. Some programmers are a little smarter.
So, you are a young person just starting out, and are not blessed with parents that can show you how to navigate, and are stuck with trial and error to begin. You take a snapshot of Pluto, get in your rocket, and take off. You don’t get there, because you did not anticipate the gravity of other planets, and even if you did, Pluto is no longer there.
You need sustainable disposable income to get where you want to go, sufficient income/rent, with momentum, somewhere in the middle, just on the other side of the fulcrum, like an accountant or some such other nonsensical job. You are beginning at a gas station or something, to begin collecting the necessary pieces, renting a room or staying with your parents.
At each event horizon, you are going to be surrounded by the majority, which wants to get to the next energy level up, but wants to do so for free, and has habits, false assumptions embedded in their behavior, which they got from the “it takes a community to raise a child” crowd. You are the potential ride, to be used and thrown away. And, you really have no idea where you are going, because you are exploring your talents and developing your skills accordingly. You have to “fit,” employing as little energy as possible, with others pretending to work 40+ hours a week.
Anyone can fall through energy levels, say from accountant to homeless, and most do, and anyone can be used as a rigged lottery winner to keep everyone else playing. The point of incorporation, the counterweight, is to waste your time doing so. Don’t take it personally and expect to get anywhere. Of course the public, private and non-profits are going to tax you into the grave, if they can see your course. Employ natural uncertainty, reward on risk, which the majority is trying to avoid, with monetary and fiscal policy, to propel yourself. Let Skynet see what you want it to see.
Once you see how slow the system really is, because your automatic system responds to the automatons, you can begin to see, that it’s really all about who you want to work with, who is looking for you. Timing is far more important than speed. Tourist jobs are always available. Better jobs are hired between January and May. Better jobs are hired once every 4 to 7 years. And you will always find stepping stones wherever you go, if you look, because you aren’t the first to go. Open your mind, before you begin.
Can you imagine my kids in Public Education with an understanding of cash flow, margin, and confidence in future cash flow, at 7 or 8? What do you suppose they are going to think, and more importantly, do, when teachers open their mouths and false assumptions fall out, only to fall back on peer pressure to maintain class order, with textbooks arbitrarily written for the purpose?
I have done everything I can to give you a head start on my next set of kids, but they have me, and my wife, which as you can now see, is why the State is so determined to commandeer my children, and why I train them accordingly. Imagine what 7 and 8 year-olds with functioning brain cells are thinking now. If you think things are bad now, you might want to be on another planet 10 years from now.
Doug Litowitz touches on some unique subject matter in terms of the unconscious aspects of CNBC programming to populations of Skinner Box(tm) pigeons on a behavioural level. Frankly, CNBC programmes a trance state of unrealistic optimism due to Wall Street industry requirements to shill product 24/7. Producers at CNBC can be sued by companies if they publish negative opinion pieces so they guard against litigation by always maintaining irrational exuberance as an ongoing ethos of their primary purpose in terms of a marketing objective. CNBC is industry scum that benchmarks industry scum sentiment on a daily basis. Without the baseline of CNBC sentiment being foisted upon an unwitting public people would tend to avoid investment entirely. Just like McDonalds Corp., CNBC is self-perpetuating in objective scope of what their goals are industry wide. In other words, CNBC wants to sell you shit that costs you money just like a predator used car salesperson, or a predator subprime loans bankster like Angelo Mozilo or Jamie Dimon, Blankfein, Fuld, et cetera.
I love the CNBC threesome interviews. Two bulls and a bear. As soon as the bear opens his/her mouth the two bulls start laughing. The bulls talk over the bear when he/she is trying to state their case. Happens every time.
The best part was when Sylvia use to come on drunk and rant.
CNBC does what its ZioComcast Master tells them to.
And Aaron Ross ZioSorkin makes sure to keep everyone in line on Squak ZioBox.
Send this to joe.kernen@nbcuni.com
its time i read 1984 again, how did it end? so far Orwell is getting everything correct. Should his book be in fiction or non fiction?
Although 1984 was supposed to be a warning, the TPTB are actually using it as a handbook
No. CNBC is financial Hollywood and nothing more. It's whereucky mucks go to be seen.
How can something so unpopular be so popular? It can't so it isn't! http://tvbythenumbers.zap2it.com/2015/06/25/cable-news-ratings-for-wedne...
What amazes me is how CNBC just happens to find people who only answer Jeb Bush or Hillary when asked who they want for President.
Sad part in CNBC was that they couldn't feature Foreign Stocks and Funds (save some ADRs and Closed End Funds traded on the major exchanges).
It may have been better if Dow/WSJ spent the money on a Channel.
I like Santelli he's as close as CNBC gets to real. Oh and the lady that doesn't show her stuff, Kelly I think is her name. She asks good questions and puts the guests on the spot.
BTFD!!!