Pulled from Paul Farrel, CBS Marketwatch 4-12-10
The Propaganda Machine: In 2007-2008BusinessWeek, Kiplinger's and USA Today reported the false predictions made before the 2008 subprime credit meltdown which spread rapidly across America and the world:
- Bernanke: "I don't anticipate any serious [failures] among large internationally active banks."
- Ken Fisher: "This year will end in the plus column ... so keep buying."
- "Mad Money" Jim Cramer: "Bye-bye bear market, say hello to the bull."
- Goldman Sachs' Abby Joseph Cohen: "The fear priced into stocks is likely to abate as recession fears fade."
- Barney Frank: "Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are fundamentally sound."
- Barron's: "Home prices about to bottom."
- Worth magazine: "Emerging markets are the global investors' safe haven."
- Kiplinger's: "Stock investors should beat the rush to the banks."
- Madoff: "It's virtually impossible to violate the rules."
The Propaganda Machine in 2000-2003 crash and recessionTaken from the 2003 book "Bull! 144 Statements from the Market's Fallen Prophets," published during the 30-month recession, when Wall Street was losing $8 trillion in market cap. Here's a few of America's opinion leaders spreading their misleading happy talk as the market slowly disintegrated for 30 months from 11,722 to 7,286 in October 2002. Yet they prattled on. Unfortunately, many of these fallen prophets are still misleading investors as members of the new Propaganda Machine:
- James Glassman, author "Dow 36,000." "What is dangerous is for Americans not to be in the market. We're going to reach a point where stocks are correctly priced, and we think that's 36,000 ... It's not a bubble. ... The stock market is undervalued." A month earlier Dan Kadlec published "Dow 100,000." (October 1999)
- Larry Kudlow, CNBC host. "This correction will run its course until the middle of the year. Then things will pick up again, because not even Greenspan can stop the Internet economy." (February 2000)
- "Mad Money's" Cramer: "SUNW probably has the best near-term outlook of any company I know." (September 2000)
- Lehman's Jeffrey Applegate. "The bulk of the correction is behind us, so now is the time to be offensive, not defensive." (December 2000)
- Alan Greenspan. "The 3- to 5-year earnings projections of more than a thousand analysts ... have generally held firm. Such expectations, should they persist, bode well for continued capital deepening and sustained growth." (December 2000)
- Suze Orman. "The QQQ, they're a buy at 60. They may go down, but if you dollar-cost average, where you put money every single month into them ... in the long run, it's the way to play the Nasdaq." (January 2001)
- Maria Bartiromo. "The individual out there is actually not throwing money at things that they do not understand, and is actually using the news and using the information out there to make smart decisions." (March 2001)
- Goldman Sachs' Cohen. "The time to be nervous was a year ago. The S&P then was overvalued, it's now undervalued." (April 2001)
- Lou Dobbs, CNN. "Let me make it very clear. I'm a bull, on the market, on the economy. And let me repeat, I am a bull." (August 2001)
- Larry Kudlow. "The shock therapy of a decisive war will elevate the stock market by a couple thousand points," with Dow 35,000 by 2010. (June 2002)
All propaganda. No facts. All happy talk designed to manipulate you and me. All part of a tacit conspiracy, the Propaganda Machine. In fact, the Dow bottomed only after a 30-month bear market, in October 2002 at 7,286. The Iraq War started in April 2003.The Propaganda Machine in the 1929 crash and 1930's depressionLet's go back to the crash of '29 and the first Great Depression.So listen closely to all the happy-talking -- past, present and future -- and plan accordingly because 2012 is the new 1929:
- Irving Fisher, Yale Ph.D. in economics: "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months." (Oct. 17, 1929)
- Goodbody market-letter in New York Times: "We feel that fundamentally Wall Street is sound, and that for people who can afford to pay for them outright, good stocks are cheap at these prices." (Oct. 25, 1929)
- Business Week: "The Wall Street crash doesn't mean that there will be any general or serious business depression ... For six years American business has been diverting a substantial part of its attention, its energies and its resources on the speculative game... Now that irrelevant, alien and hazardous adventure is over. Business has come home again, back to its job, providentially unscathed, sound in wind and limb, financially stronger than ever before." (Nov. 2, 1929)
- Harvard Economic Society: "A serious depression seems improbable; [we expect] recovery of business next spring, with further improvement in the fall." (Nov. 10, 1929)
- Treasury Secretary Andrew W. Mellon: "I see nothing in the present situation that is either menacing or warrants pessimism ... I have every confidence that there will be a revival of activity in the spring, and that during this coming year the country will make steady progress." (Dec. 31, 1929)
- President Herbert Hoover: "The depression is over." (June 1930)
The propaganda machine is in full effect in 2010, are you going to fall for it again!
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