Thursday, May 10, 2012

Who Is Gold Hater Joe Weisenthal?

We learn in a NYT mag profile:
Weisenthal is the lead financial blogger for Business Insider...

Weisenthal wanted to come to New York as a playwright. In college at the University of Texas, he wrote the lyrics and music for a satire of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, and after graduating in 2002, he submitted it to the New York International Fringe Festival. When the play was rejected, he took the analyst position instead. And when that began to sour, he and a friend started a blog...

In recent months he has delighted in taunting gold bugs, both those who view the shiny metal as a smart investment and those who want to return the United States to a gold standard.

“It makes me happy when gold falls,” he wrote in a recent Twitter post, “since it means many of my ideological opponents are poorer than they were the day before.”

Weisenthal says his own political thinking has shifted from something like libertarianism to the Keynesian view that the government should borrow and spend massively during a recession. Weisenthal regularly seizes on lackluster economic data to remind readers that the government is not doing enough to boost the economy, and he defends the Federal Reserve’s efforts to accelerate growth.

10 comments:

  1. Nice! This explains a lot.

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  2. The man has serious skills.

    It's a shame he looks through Keynesian glasses. It would be a good thing if *someday* they come off.

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  3. Why are you advertising for this moron? Picking on morons makes you look like one...

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  4. If he encourages more Fed inflation like the duped lackey he apparently is, he won't be getting any joy from watching the price of gold

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  5. At this point, I just pity the guy. I pity a lot of these Keynesians. They tried looking at all of the data available and then just threw up their hands and said "awww, the math-heavy demagogue must be right."

    Many of them now say that Austrians are wrong because the great big hyperinflation hasn't happened yet. It's sad that we'll have to get to that point to have the possibility of changing our ways. Even if it does happen, though, these people will find a way to explain it so that they can evade letting Keynesianism take responsibility.

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  6. Two words for the Keynesian's: Cognitive Dissonance

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  7. I wonder if he's a bitcoin hater too.

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  8. It says something about BI that a failed "playwright" (and of course it just so totally works that it was "a satire of Ayn Rand’s philosophy") who graduated just 10 years ago is their lead "financial" blogger.

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  9. Such schadenfreude from Wiesenthal. I'm sure many people who keep a portion of their wealth in gold aren't ideological at all- they just have lower time preference and are trying to maintain value into the future. After all, not everyone can be a full-time money manager like gleeful Joe. Of course, that's just the way the "business insiders" like it; hence they denigrate the alternatives to having to place wealth in their hands and love volatile, inflationary economic conditions.

    But Joe, perhaps you should be placing -your- money where your mouth is and show us all how it's done... Bury your wealth in cash and we'll see how well it performs relative to gold in a couple years. But I suspect, based upon the short bio in this post, that you're a high time preference kind of guy so keep on talking your book... The "long run" is here.

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  10. Oh, and the part of the article where Wiesenthal is tweaking like a meth head and just about pissing his pants because... non-farm payroll is about to be released? Gimme a break. And we're supposed to take this blasé, myopic, childish tabloid-peddler seriously about long-term wealth management? Nah, I gave Joe too much credit in my previous comment. He's just a troll with ADD who happened to be interested in finance.

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