"Media Consolidation: The Illusion of Choice"

Media Consolidation: The Illusion of Choice 

• 6 media giants control 90% of what Americans read, watch, or listen to.  
• 232 media executives control the information diet of 277 million Americans

Free markets and competition work exceedingly well.  Really.  Why don't you believe me?

‘Media is diverting attention & dividing people’

Former Supreme Court judge and now chairman of the Press Council of India (via churumuri):

Indian media is very often playing an anti-people role. One, it diverts the attention of the people from the real problems, which are basically economic. 80% people are living in horrible poverty, unemployment, facing price rise, healthcare. You divert attention from those problems and instead you parade parade film stars, fashion parades, cricketers, as if they are the problems.

Two, very often the media (deliberately) divides the people (on religious lines). This is a country of great diversity because it is a country broadly of immigrants. We must respect each other and remain united. After every bomb blast, almost every channel report that Indian Mujahidin or Jaish-e-Mohammed or Harkatul-jihad-e-islam have sent e-mails or SMS claiming responsibility. Now an e-mail can be sent by any mischievous person, but by showing this on TV channels and next day in the newspapers the tendency is to demonise all Muslims in the country as terrorists and bomb throwers.

Third, the media must promote scientific ideas to help the country move forward, like the European media did. Here the media promotes superstition, astrology. You know, 90% of the people in the country are mentally very backward, steeped in casteism, communalism, superstition and so on. Should the media help uplift them and bring them up to a higher mental level and make them part of enlightened India, or should it go down to their level and perpetuate their backwardness? Many channels show astrology, which is pure humbug, total superstition.

B..but the competition, invisible hand, free markets?

PS: The full interview here: http://ibnlive.in.com/shows/Devil%27s+Advocate/197593.html. Lots of good ones like 'Cricket is the opium of the masses'.

Indian Telecoms Run to Mamma

Rock bottom rates and tariff wars among mobile operators might soon be a thing of the past with sector regulator Trai deciding to intervene in the market and end years of forbearance. Operators would then have to present a business case each time they come out with a tariff package. Only once the regulator is convinced the new tariffs are profitable would they be approved.

With the Indian telecom market's growing maturity, Trai had moved to a orbearance regime in 2004, wherein operators did not require prior approval for tariff packages, but were left to market forces. Operators simply had to file their tariffs with the regulator within a week of implementing them.

Bharti Airtel (BHARTIARTL.BO: 319.850) CEO Manoj Kohli had recently urged Trai to look into predatory pricing, where operators offer tariffs at below cost.

Well, well, well. Who'd have thought that the market couldn't work it all out? The predator would be bankrupted over time leaving the strongest competitor in the field. Right? Apparently not. Markets work in mysterious ways. Link

Free Markets 0, Greenspan 0

...in a tense exchange with Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the committee, Mr. Greenspan conceded a more serious flaw in his own philosophy that unfettered free markets sit at the root of a superior economy.

“I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms,” Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: “I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact.”

Mr. Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words. “In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working,” Mr. Waxman said.

“Absolutely, precisely,” Mr. Greenspan replied. “You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well.”

OK, that's that then.

Welcome To The USSRA!

Man is this guy angry! Nouriel Roubini (who's he, eh? Let's just say, The Man Who Saw The Future, or since we are already in it, The Man Who Saw The Present Before Almost Anyone Else. More info here, and here, and indeed here):

For the last twenty years after the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Iron Curtain and the economic reforms in China and other emerging market economies the world economy has moved away from state ownership of the economy and towards privatization of previously stated owned enterprises. This trend was aggressively supported the United States that preached right and left the benefits of free markets and free private enterprise.

Today instead the US has performed the greatest nationalization in the history of humanity. By nationalizing Fannie and Freddie the US has increased its public assets by almost $6 trillion and has increased its public debt/liabilities by another $6 trillion. The US has also turned itself into the largest government-owned hedge fund in the world: by injecting a likely $200 billion of capital into Fannie and Freddie and taking on almost $6 trillion of liabilities of such GSEs the US has also undertaken the biggest and most levered LBO (“leveraged buy-out”) in human history that has a debt to equity ratio of 30 ($6,000 billion of debt against $200 billion of equity).

So now Comrades Bush, Paulson and Bernanke (as originally nicknamed by Willem Buiter) have now turned the USA into the USSRA (the United Socialist State Republic of America). Socialism is indeed alive and well in America; but this is socialism for the rich, the well connected and Wall Street. A socialism where profits are privatized and losses are socialized with the US tax-payer being charged the bill of $300 billion.

Read it all.

Systemic Banking Crisis In The US?

(via CalculatedRisk): All claws, teeth, and fur (head out to the last paragraph of the PDF)

What will be the consequence of losses of over $1 trillion and, possibly, as high as $2 trillion? That would wipe out most of the capital of most of the US banking system and lead most of US banks and mortgage lenders – that are massively exposed to real estate – to go belly up. You would then have a systemic banking crisis of proportions that would be several orders of magnitude larger than the S&L crisis, a crisis that ended up with a fiscal bailout cost of over $120 billion dollars. And the worrisome part of this scenario is that – with home prices likely to fall by 20% or more – this scenario of systemic banking crisis is becoming increasingly likely.

What impact would that have on Udayan's long bull run?

Drug Companies Rigging The Markets?

From The Hindu:

...the real story goes way beyond the question of Prozac. This new study — published, paradoxically, in an open-access journal — tells a fascinating story of buried data and of our collective failure, as a society, over half a century, to adequately regulate the colossal global $550b pharmaceutical industry.

The key issue is simple. In any situation, to make any kind of sensible decision about which treatment is best, a doctor must be able to take into account all of the available information. But drug companies have repeatedly been shown to bury unflattering data.

Sometimes they bury data that shows drugs to be actively harmful. This happened in the case of Vioxx and heart attacks, and SSRIs and suicidal thoughts. Such stories feel, intuitively, like cover-ups. But there are also more subtle issues at stake in the burying of results showing minimal efficacy, and these have only been revealed through the investigative work of medical academics.

One example came just last month (January). As I reported at the time, a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine dug out a list of all trials on SSRIs that had ever been registered with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and then went to look for those same trials in the academic literature. There were 37 studies which were assessed by the FDA as positive and, with a single exception, every one of those positive trials was written up, proudly, and published in full. But there were also 33 studies which had negative or iffy results and, of those, 22 were simply not published at all — they were buried — while 11 were written up and published in a way that portrayed them as having a positive outcome.

But I thought the markets were sifting the wheat from the chaff, rewarding the good companies and punishing the bad. But what do I know.

Privatise Profits, Socialise Losses

From Calculated Risk:

Over the last two decades, few industries have lobbied more ferociously or effectively than banks to get the government out of its business and to obtain freer rein for “financial innovation.”

But as losses from bad mortgages and mortgage-backed securities climb past $200 billion, talk among banking executives for an epic government rescue plan is suddenly coming into fashion.

A confidential proposal that Bank of America circulated to members of Congress this month provides a stunning glimpse of how quickly the industry has reversed its laissez-faire disdain for second-guessing by the government — now that it is in trouble.

The line from the title is borrowed from countless commenters on the above blog and many other blogs. Says it well.
Another instance of the same, here.

The Way The Cookie Crumbles

From NY Times (via The Hindu):

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending — like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood — just doesn’t happen.
...
Of course, now that it has all gone bad, people with ties to the financial industry are rethinking their belief in the perfection of free markets. Mr. Greenspan has come out in favor of, yes, a government bailout. “Cash is available,” he says — meaning taxpayer money — “and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”

Quit And Re-apply

It is a truism in the IT industry that one could quit and rejoin the same company at a higher pay - this following from the fact that comparable lateral hires mostly get higher pay packages compared to the existing employees. But employees at Circuit City, the electronics retailer chain in the US, are getting are being forced to do the opposite (via Atrios). But the consumers get a good deal right? So it should be ok.