Davos Newbies

Martin Wolf is devastating about Rupert Murdoch in the Financial Times (subscription required):

Down-market is the direction  Mr Murdoch knows. That has been the direction in all of his publications with which I am familiar.  Mr Murdoch can take substantial credit for the tide of vulgarity that now floods the UK. For good or ill, he has helped transform my country.

But it’s Wolf’s peroration that is important:

A cynical employee of the FT might argue that any faltering of the Journal can only be to its benefit. I am not that cynical. The world needs at least two respected, editorially independent and authoritative English-language business papers. One is too few. None would be a catastrophe. Great newspapers are more than just businesses. They provide the public good of reliable information on which our knowledge-intensive society depends. Competitive markets do not provide public goods well. We may discover quite soon just how bad at it markets can be.

Where could you read this?

When greed exceeds fear, markets rise — and vice versa. Today, fear seems to be increasing: Even before last week’s jitters, many smart operators thought assets were priced above their fundamental values. But greed has been increasing even more rapidly. As a result, what one could call “net greed” is still on an upward trend.

The globalization of finance has spawned a global greed pandemic. As the rich get richer, they don’t stop wanting to get richer. Hedge-fund managers, buyout barons, investment bankers and oligarchs look around and see others who are making even more money than they are.

The smart players are infected more by greed than by fear largely because they often have safety nets. Managers of hedge funds and private-equity firms — the two dominant species in the modern financial jungle — typically collect 20% of the profits when things go well. But they don’t share in the losses when things go badly. This one-way bet accentuates greed and blunts fear.

Probably in one of the many lefty blogs or publications I favor, you’d think. Wrong. It’s Hugo Dixon’s Breaking Views (subscription required), a Lex-like column syndicated in The Wall Street Journal. I think his analysis is sound, and I like his rhetoric. But it’s certainly discordant with most of what I read in the Journal, where “greed is good” seems to be a watchword.

From the always wonderful Strange Maps. The map may be the best visualization of the true vastness of the US economy.