The Power of Suggestion, and a Manufactured Financial Crisis

Do me a favor, and go type "The worst economic crisis since the Great Depression" into Google. If you include the quotes, you get about 65 thousand results. This phrase was brought back to my attention during the presidential debates this year, as it was dutifully trotted out by Obama as a means of depicting a bleak economic picture of our country. Leaving aside for a moment that our current economic woes don't even begin to approach the level of the Great Depression, and that every metric I've seen has its equal in far more recent times, I'd like to focus on the effect of the words in that phrase.

I recall first hearing those words being tossed about during the 2004 presidential election cycle, when FrankenKerry first started droning on about how Bush was heading us all straight for the dustbowl. The assertion was even more absurd then than it is now, but that didn't stop Kerry, and others on the left and in the media (wait, did I just repeat myself?) from repeating it ad nauseum.

Even after Kerry lost, the phrase really didn't go dormant. Leftist pundits and politicians continued to bemoan the ailing state of our economy, exaggerating, misinterpreting and sometimes inventing various figures to support their doom and gloom prophesies about our finanical future as a nation. It became something of a litany. Each day, from the major newspapers, networks and websites, more horrible news about the economy would break. The media played on the public's misunderstanding that any decline in a market is a bad thing, and started capitalizing on what was originally only a correction in the housing market. Unemployment rates, though still low, rose slightly, and talking heads across America tore their robes and smeared ash on their faces.

All of this negative press, I believe, was not without purpose. Continuing to assert how horrible the economy was eventually convinced the American people. This effectively scuttled confidence among consumer and investor alike, both of whom pulled back the reins on their spending and investing. These actions further depressed markets and provided more fodder for the Chicken Little media. It was a snowball effect of the worst degree, and was having the effect of a viral infection on the economy.

It would be easy to explain all of this away as simply another instance of the media only reporting the bad news, because that's what sells, but in this case I don't think that's the explanation. Markets rise and fall all the time, and the various statistics go up and down along with them, but I don't recall ever seeing such coverage and analysis of each inane report that comes out regarding the economy. Why all this focus, all this effort to try and spin the economy in a negative direction? Why are they trying to actually make this "The worst economy since the Great Depression?"

Simple. Because it's nearly impossible for a political party to retain control after they've been blamed for economic downturn. This "throw the bums out" mentality has been a documented presence in electoral politics for well over a century, and the Democrats desparately needed it to win this year's election. With conditions in Iraq improving, they had to have something to point at and say they could do it better, so it was time to use the power of suggestion, through the media, to manufacture a financial crisis.

I will not disagree that we were facing something of a slow-down even without the media's influence. But I believe that, in order to ensure the success of their chosen candidate, the mainstream media did everything in their power to escalate and accelerate that slowdown into the "crisis" we face today.

The irony is that if Obama is elected tonight, and is able to enact many of the things he's talked about on the campaign trail, that crisis is very likely to worsen severely.

~Cephas
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