Must-Read: Economist: Hands off

Must-Read: News magazines that have spent all of the current millennium so far making excuses for Britain’s Conservative and Unionist Party have been playing with fire. Now there is some sign they are aware of just how badly they and Britain are getting burned. Let us hope that it is not too late, and that they do not backslide:

Economist: Hands off the Bank of England: “Politicians who casually attack the central bank’s integrity are playing with fire…”

Buttonwood: Central banking and the press: Anatomy of a stupid rumour: “MARK Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, has upset many people in the Conservative party because of his warnings about the economic impact of Brexit…

…This political pressure on an independent central bank governor is a great mistake. On the day after the referendum vote, the prime minister resigned and Brexit campaign leaders were nowhere to be seen; it was Mark Carney who stepped forward to calm the markets. He was the only grown-up in the room. Now the stories are circulating that Mr Carney might resign, with some even suggesting that it could happen as soon as this week. But… the British press starts to chase its own tail…. This whole affair just shows how careful one must be in a world of 24-hour news and social media. A throwaway remark in one piece becomes a source in another story and then an authoritative looking statement in a national newspaper; Chinese whispers in the internet age. 

It’s not 24-hour news and social media that’s the problem: it’s Buttonwood having in interest in pretending that the tackiest of hacky hacks write for “a national newspaper” that makes things that are for no substantive reason classified by Buttonwood as “authoritative looking statement[s]…”