The Better Letter: The Culture of Charade
The value of truth-telling.
The classic 1963 American romantic comedy thriller, Charade, produced and directed by Stanley Donen, and featuring an all-star cast including Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy, will be playing under the stars this weekend here in San Diego. The week’s TBL will feature charade in a different context plus some follow-up to last week’s missive.
If you like The Better Letter, please subscribe, share it, and forward it widely.
Thanks for reading.
The Culture of Charade
We’ve all seen them, and they’re dreadful.
So-called “business television” – CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, and the like – often bring on lower-tier would-be experts from the hinterlands, sometimes in the middle of the night, to fill time by opining on the latest news, the newest data release, or the ongoing market action in response to an anchor’s softball set-up (big-time money managers use a similar approach; financial radio, local financial TV shows, and ghost-written books are in the same boat – they’re typically commercials disguised as information). The interviewee often ignores the set-up and plows ahead to pre-scripted and mundane (at best) talking points as quickly as possible.
Such appearances are often arranged by PR firms who brag about these “placements” and are paid well for doing so. These hits are worth doing for the networks because there is nothing like 24 hours per day of actual business and market news on offer. They have lots of time to fill.
Even so, YouTube videos of this silliness tend to show up like clockwork that same day on the websites of the interviewees (“as featured in”) to be promoted both as a badge of inclusion in the universe of experts and as a marketing tool. It’s all about establishing and building a brand.
The videos provide a veneer of supposed expertise even though the entire exercise is bogus. The “news” is effectively meaningless, and the “analysis” adds nothing to the story. However, the interviewee’s muppets won’t know that nobody who matters pays these appearances any mind and won’t recognize how lousy they are. It won’t even matter that almost nobody watches.
It’s a charade, but nearly everybody plays along.
These “interviews,” weak-sauce though they are, offer a win-win – the network gets its airtime filled and the interviewees can pretend they are big shots with important opinions. But, in no time, they all begin to sound the same, like those junior high oral reports most of us had to give and endure.
Even worse, they are fundamentally phony.
The entire conceit is ridiculous because the “news” being reacted to is almost always functionally irrelevant to any meaningful investment process. The latest capacity utilization number may become a helpful piece of the economic puzzle, but it is highly unlikely to suggest any major change in the economy. Yet “business television” rolls with the charade that something urgent must be reported. The idea is to feign hotness, newness, and originality to attract eyeballs.
Talking about long-term ideas, opportunities, and trends, as well as substantive issues related to the markets, might really help people, but the purveyors of business media largely assume that immediacy and urgency are necessary to capture viewers and readers – they may be right about that. But it’s still a charade.
Even traders, who really do make moment-to-moment decisions about the markets, rarely rely on television for actionable news. If it’s on the air, it’s almost always too late to act on it meaningfully.
Indeed, nearly everything that gets a lot of attention in the financial services business today is focused upon faster and phonier. The interviews noted above are quick-hits tied to an immediate event but without value. That said, I’ve hardly scratched the surface of the game-playing that goes on, much of it far more troublesome and damaging than the relatively harmless interviews I have been describing so far. And the problem extends well beyond finance, obviously.
Part of the aggregate charade is the tameness of the business press and bloggers alike. As pointed out by Dean Starkman, among others, the U.S. business press, like public prosecutors, utterly failed to investigate and hold Wall Street players accountable in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2008-2009. Few bloggers did either. Nobody wanted the music to stop.
That’s why the crisis came as such a shock to the public and to the press itself.
In a March 2009 interview that would go viral, Jon Stewart confronted Jim Cramer by asserting, in effect, that business journalism presents itself as providing wall-to-wall, 24/7 coverage of Wall Street yet had somehow managed to miss the most important thing ever to happen on that beat. “It is a game that you know is going on, but you go on television as a financial network and pretend it isn’t happening.”
Cramer’s excuse essentially was that he and the business press merely give the public what it wants. So whether the error was intentional (Stewart’s view) or negligent and stupid (the view of James Surowiecki of The New Yorker — a view I share because, consistent with Hanlon’s Razor, I expect stupidity first), the public was still horribly underserved.
Indeed, our industry is replete with illustrations of the culture of charade. Examples follow (off the top-of-my-head; it’s hardly a complete list).
Ongoing conspiracies to hide excessive fees, poor performance (among clients, managers, and the hedge fund industry), and the value of indexing.
Advertising white papers, research reports and educational events that are nothing but marketing exercises.
Fear-mongering and/or bandwagoning for business.
Touting products and services as being original, innovative, and valuable that are nothing of the sort.
Failing to present all sides of an argument fully, fairly, and honestly.
The pressure to “build a brand” at the expense of depth, accuracy, and nuance is enormous.
In the real world, of course, longer-term and more substantive thinking is winning where it matters, in that money is generally leaving funds and approaches that aren’t working at record rates — a phenomenon that terrifies Wall Street and leaves much of the financial media unsure of what to do (there are exceptions, of course: see below). Moreover, there are many journalists, blogs, and sites that are consistently excellent – I try to mention and link them often (start here).
Consistent with that progress, I will continue to try to avoid the various charades that the investment world is so fond of (like the world-at-large) and to point them out when I see them. Moreover, when I fail (and I will), I invite you to call me on it and pledge that I will try to own up to my mistakes quickly and publicly. We all need to be held accountable.
Mostly, it boils down to trying to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. Sadly, that doesn’t often seem very hot or original.
That said, telling the truth can be dangerous business. Bias in reporting facts and events, of any kind, is as inevitable as point of view. You cannot not have it. That means error is pretty much inevitable, even by those acting good faith. On the other hand, mere disagreement routinely draws accusations of dishonesty.
Of course, some of those claims of dishonesty are true. Indeed, telling the financial world over-and-over that your fund will return 50 percent per year for the next five years, on seemingly legitimate “business” media platforms that provide credibility, and lots of people will believe you, even if you’re *down* by huge amounts. That approach works all too well all too often. And it’s hardly original, at least in style.
Originality is invaluable, and it is much rarer yet also more accessible than we tend to assume. C.S. Lewis, the renowned literary critic and medievalist who later became famous as an author of children’s literature and as a Christian apologist, perhaps said it best in Mere Christianity.
“[N]o man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth … you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
As the Polish Nobel laureate, Czesław Miłosz, said: “In a room where people unanimously maintain a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot.”
Therefore, my desire here (and everywhere) is always to tell the truth (in Solzhenitsyn’s words, to “live not by lies” – more here) and let the chips fall where they may. Our culture of charade doesn’t value truth-telling, which explains why it is so rare, but it is the best way to be original and to impart value that I know.
Totally Worth It
Puzzle: Every day at noon in Le Havre an ocean liner sails to New York, and simultaneously in New York an ocean liner sails to Le Havre. The crossing takes exactly seven days and seven nights in either direction. How many other ocean liners will an ocean liner leaving Le Havre today pass at sea by the time it arrives in New York? Answer below.
Solution: You will pass 13 at sea, and you will meet a final one that is departing as you reach New York at noon in a week’s time. If you answered "7", then you overlooked the liners that left New York in the past week and are currently at sea. You will pass all of them on your journey too.
~ from Can You Solve My Problems?, by Alex Bellos
Feel free to contact me via rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or on Twitter (@rpseawright) and let me know what you like, what you don’t like, what you’d like to see changed, and what you’d add. Praise, condemnation, and feedback are always welcome.
Don’t forget to subscribe and share TBL. Please.
Of course, the easiest way to share TBL is simply to forward it to a few dozen of your closest friends.
This is the best thing I saw or read this week. The funniest, unless it was this, or this. The truest. The sweetest. The most bizarre. The most predictable. The most interesting. The most intriguing. The best idea. The best dis. The least surprising, unless it was this. This will be big news. Confirmation bias writ large. Not wrong. 3,000. Insane. Birds Aren’t Real.
Please send me your nominees for this space to rpseawright [at] gmail [dot] com or via Twitter (@rpseawright).
Last week, I wrote about music, beauty, and contingency. In it, I offered some creative new music and new artists in response to Tom Morgan’s query about beautiful music. In response, I was inundated with many other excellent examples from readers. Thank you. Here are just nine of them.
The TBL Spotify playlist now includes more than 200 songs and about 15 hours of great music. I urge you to listen in, sing along, and turn the volume up.
Benediction
Amen.
Thanks for reading.
Issue 111 (April 29, 2022)