All risks, all the time

If any phrase were to describe the editorial policy of FT Alphaville it might be, 'All risks, all the time'. So we were more than slightly surprised to find them this morning touting a blog post by Eric Falkenstein entitled, 'A Perennial Risk Problem', in which the writer complains that merely reporting everything that might go wrong, without any attempt to prioritize by cost and probability of occurrence '...is quite useless and not profound'. The take-home sentence from the piece is:

'Enumerating a long list of disparate things that may happen, without any probabilities, may work for Nouriel Roubini, but he's a charlatan'.

An apt explanation as to why Ibex Salad has transformed itself from being a quaint expression of its writer's parochial interests (if not his grotesquely inflated self-image) to actually having an entry category entitled 'Press and blogs'. Readers seeking to assign blame for this transformation could do worse than spend a couple of hours on a fog-bound day going through Edward Hugh's 'Spain Economy Watch'.

Let there be no misunderstanding here - we are not meaning to imply that FTAV or its writers are no more than a collection of mountebanks. But, just as investors are required in many jurisdictions to disclose whether they hold investment positions in securities mentioned in a given piece, perhaps some public admission that they and the grand part of the world's 'information' providers - due to the sociology that determines readership share and, thus, content and profitability - currently hold massive long positions on disaster would be in order.

We can think of various ways to do this, but would be more than satisfied if the disclaimer attached to any article were a mere 'If it bleeds, it leads'. In the case of the Spanish press, they could add, 'Si un anglo lo dice, se lo repite'... for example.

----------------------------