by Philip Giraldi, The Unz Review:
Our Financial Markets and Their Many Irrationalities
I launched my American Pravda series a decade ago next month. My conscious strategy was quite unusual, being almost exactly the opposite of that followed by nearly everyone else covering those same controversial topics.
As some of them explicitly told me, they had always deliberately avoided exploring too many different and unrelated historical controversies. Instead, they believed that they were on safer ground by confining their work to a relatively narrow slice of these.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
So some of them spent years challenging the official narrative on World War II or the JFK Assassination or the 9/11 Attacks or took other positions denigrated as “conspiracy theories” by our political and media establishments. But they usually focused on just one or two of those major issues, and ignored the others.
I decided to take the opposite approach and cover as many of those as possible. After years of effort, my American Pravda series has now done this, constituting a broader collection of such material than anything else I’ve encountered on the Internet.
- The American Pravda Series
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • 146 Articles • 1,230,000 Words
In an October 2016 article, I’d sketched out the reasoning behind my contrary approach:
Individuals who challenge the prevailing media narrative with unorthodox ideas are often reluctant to raise too many such controversial claims simultaneously lest they be ridiculed as “crazy,” with all their views summarily dismissed.
In most cases, this may be the correct strategy to pursue, but if handled properly, an exact opposite approach might sometimes be quite effective…Or as suggested in a quote widely misattributed to Stalin, “Quantity has a quality all its own.”
Suppose it is established that there is a reasonable likelihood that the media completely missed and ignored an important matter that should have been investigated and reported. The impact is not necessarily substantial, and many individuals stubbornly wedded to a belief in their establishment media narratives might even resist admitting the possibility that the media had seriously erred in that particular situation.
However, suppose instead that several dozen such separate examples could be established, each strongly suggesting a serious error or omission on the part of the media. At that point, ideological defenses would crumble and nearly everyone would quietly acknowledge that many, perhaps even most, of the accusations were probably true, producing an enormous credibility gap for the mainstream media. The credibility defenses of the media would have been saturated and overcome…
For example, in the original 2013 American Pravda article I raised over half a dozen enormous media lapses, all of them now universally acknowledged: Enron’s collapse, the Iraq War WMDs, the Madoff Swindle, the Cold War spies, and various others. Having thereby set the stage by presenting this admitted pattern of major failure, demonstrating that a considerable suspension of disbelief was warranted, I then extended the discussion to three or four important additional examples, none of them yet acknowledged, but all of them perfectly plausible. Perhaps as a consequence, the article received reasonably good attention including by elements of the mainstream media itself, who are often willing to acknowledge the errors of their class so long as these are presented persuasively and in a responsible manner.
- American Pravda: Breaching the Media Barrier
Ron Unz • The Unz Review • October 24, 2016 • 2,500 Words
This same sort of reasoning also applies to financial matters.
If our markets seem to be severely mispricing one enormous risk, there is a natural tendency to dismiss that possibility. But if there appear to be several such looming financial disasters, all of which have been completely ignored by most traders and investors, faith in the wisdom of these latter market makers begins to dissolve.
This conclusion is further supported by some major examples from the last few decades.
