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Ah, I get it. This financial black hole is a problem because it distracts from issues Friedman likes to write about. Based on the rest of his column, his mastery of finance appears a little thin, though that doesn't stop him from explaining in child-like terms what's been happening to us for well over a year now. Friedman plaintively wonders: "Why couldn't former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson solve this problem?" And why can't Tim Geithner "look us in the eye and spell out his strategy?" Well, it can't be because they don't have a clue; after all, like Friedman himself, they are smart, top-of-the-heap guys. No, it's because they are afraid to tell us how big it is. It's the children thing again. And then Friedman commits a truly unpardonable sin: He rolls out that moldy old chestnut from "Jaws" about needing a bigger boat. And there's more. "The problem is more complicated than anything you can imagine," he writes, as if we hadn't been frantically paging through Keynes, Galbraith and Nostradamus for weeks. He then offers up more Weekly Reader explanations. We go from silver bullets to bubbles to banks to the difficulties of climbing out of big craters. Friedman, alone in this universe, seems to know that subprime mortgages are worth 20 cents on the dollar. Cancel the stress tests, Tim. Mark to Friedman. He also seems to believe that the problem with Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) is its derivative contracts, which would cause havoc if the government put it into receivership. Systemic havoc: true. But it feels like Friedman's really talking about AIG and its credit default swaps. Details schmetails. Mean-spirited perhaps. But these days who has the patience to be lectured to by someone who clearly hasn't spent a minute contemplating unemployment or the intricacies of nationalization. And he's worried! By the way, Tom, this isn't just a banking crisis any more. We need a goddamned yacht. - Robert Teitelman Robert Teitelman is the editor in chief of The Deal. CategoriesComments
From: News Reference,
The comment, "We need a goddamned yacht," was clearly a poke at Friedman's unpardonably late recognition of the economic problem, Friedman's elite status as a multi-millionaire (by marriage), combined with Friedman's even more unpardonable sin as a writer for using the hackneyed phase "from "Jaws" about needing a bigger boat." I swear I've heard Friedman use that same phrase repeatedly on the tv shows. It's what Friedman does incessantly, he comes up with some simplistic verbal word play that appears to explain something when in fact it just masks Friedman's failure to understand what's really going on and then he repeats it ad nauseum. He's a broken record. "We need a bigger boat" isn't an explanation except to a child. Instead of being thoughtful and serious Friedman is glib, superficial, and almost always talking down to his audience about things that he himself doesn't really understand. It's probably why people like Charlie Rose keep having him on his show to explain things: Charlie Rose doesn't understand what's going on either and just defers to Friedman's CLAIM that he understands. Google: [Friedman Suck On This] It's Friedman spouting in the most juvenile, belligerent way about starting a war without any serious sense of the repercussions. Friedman doesn't understand the global financial collapse any better than he did the Iraq War. The most egregious thing about Friedman's juvenile prescriptions for the financial collapse is that it was arguably his popularizing of toxic economic fictions that helped lay the groundwork for much of the financial collapse.
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March 5, 2009 5:23 AM
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This may be mean spirited, but what planet has Thomas Friedman been visiting? In his New York Times 
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Only a financial pundit like Teitelman would view a yacht as a solution to the current problem.
I know the intended joke, but in an article lecturing us about a clueless pundit, it is interesting to see the compounding cluelessness of another.