Maven: GDP and Punishment

Now you know how to get on The Business Press Maven's bad side. To get on his good side, it's pretty easy: Just agree with me. I'll usually declare you brilliant.

Gene Epstein, who writes the Economic Beat column for Barron's, is one of the few journalists I can't help but consider bright, even when he has the temerity to disagree with me. I see rates holding where they are, but read Epstein's good, interpretive piece about why they might not based on Ben Bernanke's rereading of the unemployment data and fourth-quarter GDP numbers -- which, as Epstein points out, were above expectations.

Whoa! Stop the presses, dude -- you are fit to be put in a limerick. We've had 50% revisions of the fourth-quarter numbers before, going from 3.5 back to what was expected; 3.0 is a whole lot less than that. I knew a guy couldn't be right and disagree with me at the same time.

Two weeks ago, The Business Press Maven went postal on the business media when they kept reporting an obscure, unsourced French newsletter report that Bristol-Myers(BMY) was going to be taken over by Sanofi-Aventis(SNY) until it passed for fact.

Unless I've been too heavily medicated to notice, the merger hasn't happened. No surprise there. But while the media loves talking about unsourced rumors, they do less of what I want to hand out a coveted Business Press Maven "Nod of Approval" award for: discussing whether or not the deal would be a good one long-term. Extra kudos, then, are due to Forbes for doing exactly that (and the writer believes it isn't a good one long-term).

And painfully last: Fox News announced its new business channel this week, promising to be -- more friendly to corporations than CNBC? More friendly to corporate flacks and hacks than CNBC? As in, less of a service to investors? Is that metaphysically possible? More on this in the months and years to come, but I'm not even sure what to say now. Perhaps a limerick is in order.

>To order reprints of this article, click here: Reprints