Marek Fuchs
You can always learn from history, and for the business media, finding a parallel in history is easy-peasy: Just go back to the last time something even remotely similar to what you are going through now happened and peck out a quick 700 words.
The complex threads of history? The nuanced differences between separate series of unfortunate events? The possibility that history might repeat itself, but not that tidily and frequently? What are you, a wuss? Damn the torpedoes of truth -- full steam ahead. Business journalists, like military generals, are always fighting the last battle. This time it means an almost comically misguided focus on 1998, because what is happening in the stock market and economy today is exactly like what happened in 1998, or so they say. Oh my aching head, have they been saying it. But I've popped Advil like Skittles, so I'm in proper condition to tell you: They are wrong. If anything, today is the flip side of 1998. I'll start with Reuters but then make my way over to the Financial Times, which seemed to have turned itself into a 1998-theme party newspaper. (Don't forget to take your Monica rubber mask out of the closet.) But first Reuters, which keeps both feet planted firmly in the air in an article about where things stand. Check out this headline: "Fears abate but still linger post-Fed." Got that? Fears have abated. But they still linger. (The headline has since been changed to "Fears tempered but not doused by Fed.") The article comes accompanied with a photograph of the Federal Reserve building in Washington, with storm clouds looming behind it, but the first words of the article are about how everyone breathed a sigh of relief, thanks to the Fed. The entire article is tied in a nasty knot because when you force an historic parallel -- as they are to 1998 -- you tend to trail more questions than answers. And speaking of questions, my only one after reading this morning's Financial Times is: Were free hamburgers being given out to reporters who mentioned 1998? Do an archive search of the paper's Web site for "1998" and your computer will go into overdrive and begin to smoke. There are five mentions of the year today, after more in the past several days. "Analysts look at history to predict response," headlines one article, which gets right to the emerging business media party line in its lead: "To work out what the Federal Reserve will do next to contain the crisis in the financial markets, many forecasters are studying the central bank's response to a similar shock in 1998." Similar? Ugh. Wait, they are hardly done: "While no two financial crisis are alike, many parallels with that episode are likely to influence Ben Bernanke, the Fed chairman." Umm, last week we were hearing all about how Bernanke studied the Great Depression, so his reaction would be determined by his old class notes, which must be dustier than my Monica mask.
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