About 2 years ago the tenor of the publications shifted from libertarian to more and more reactionary (bordering on proto-fascist). When I skip the articles nowdays, I think that the authors have no problem with authoritarianism, as long as taxes are reduced and social welfare is gutted (it is obviously not stated as such, but most opinion-pieces speak for themself).
I don't know what could have caused that shift, but I think you can generate more traffic and hence more profit, Lokey view on this explains a lot.
Like any conspiracy site, it's going to attract people who share a view of the world in which everything must be orchestrated, controlled - a reason for all things. Randomness has no place in the mind of a conspiracy theorist. The order provided by conspiracies comfort the conspiracy theorist: paradoxically making the world feel safer, more ordered while simultaneously believing that evil people have devoted their lives to ruining yours.
If you think about it, such a psychology is naturally authoritarian-leaning. Such a mind yearns for stability, order and control.
I agree, and I see chronic conspiracy theorizing as a pathology. One should beware the Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory of Everything (antisemitism, capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy, 'Cultural Marxism', are common belief attractors on who to blame)
But conspiracies do also exist in reality - in fact, conspiracies should be rather common, as giving your opponents perfect information makes you less competitive. As they say, one man's conspiracy is another man's business plan.
There have been many occasions when "conspiracy theories" turned out to be true (Iran-Contra, Watergate, George W. Bush's manipulation of intelligence over Iraq's WMD), and it's all too convenient for the perpetrators to dismiss accusations as such.
Particularly, present day corporate media that only airs a narrow range of opinions and has zero interest in investigative journalism, tends to call anything that question the motives of those in power a conspiracy theory. Likewise the outsize role of money in US politics means it's easy for politicians to be bought and lobbied. And difficult for the corporate media, subject to the same financial pressures themselves, to point it out.
That disconnect between media reporting and reality also leads to a kind of 'conspiracy theory' that isn't a conspiracy theory at all: when politicians or corporations do corrupt things or go against the public interest in plain sight, but nobody in widely circulated news media's willing to report on it and bring it into public conversation. If you're on the right you'd say this is what's happening with immigration. If you're on the left you'd say it's what is happening with financial corruption or the military-industrial complex.
Successful democracy depends on information flow between population, media and politicians, and corruption and pressure from special interests can undermine that. Arguably conspiracy theories are a symptom of a decline of trust in a unified democratic society and particularly government and media. Those who subscribe tend to feel marginalized in some way.
Plenty of those who point this out aren't authoritarian in the least.
I don't know why you make that claim except that, once you did, many other posts on this forum followed suit. In all honesty your claim (that zerohedge is a conspiracy site) and the ensuing posts looks more like conspiracy (blog-spamming or blog-misdirection) than does zerohedge.
zerohedge WAS once a decent current economics site that sometimes featured excellent articles but the responses of members began to decay. Today the responses are mostly noise and I rarely bother to visit zerohedge.
I recall HN saying gold market manipulation was conspiracy theory, ZH was right HN commenters were wrong.
There's a long list but when it comes to finance HN commenters are typically poorly educated.
I know, I was one of those libertarians who though Obama was going to usher in a period of high inflation-driven growth. I was completely, absolutely, and astoundingly wrong.
My response was to update my beliefs, but some people's response to their theories being proven incorrect by reality is to become rigidly authoritarian.
"If reality doesn't conform to my worldview, I will make it conform!"
Remember the Communists, like modern libertarians, originally had a stateless society as their goal.
I think this is what happened with ZH and many other libertarian leaning sites.
In a world of decentralized media, you can't get readers to keep coming back if you're just another mainstream news source. Instead, you have to choose a niche viewpoint and convince readers that your outlet is the only place they can get information about it. This results in a competition between niche news outlets to present as extreme a viewpoint as their readers will tolerate, or create new viewpoints that can attract an audience.
The world is being radicalized by capital. Dividing us is profitable.
Maybe, but let's never forget centralized media is much, much worse. Many seem to forget this unfortunately. Choice is always a good thing.
I did find an anti-vaxxer piece on the frontpage, which did not exactly inspire trust: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-28/why-our-children-sh...
Which is quite solid logic - why would "they" want to ban something unless they're afraid of it?
Many libertarians I know are now "nationalist libertarians", opposed to large scale immigration, increasingly skeptical of international free trade, and so on. A lot of ex-Ron Paul types are now Trump supporters.
To me, this seems like the political/intellectual story of our time. It isn't happening in the mainstream media, of course, because libertarianism has never had the high ground there: you see it in the blogs and, of course, in the chans & reddit.
that's been very useful to me
I think the problem with this is their ideological goals are to starve the beast and play at being antiestablishment. They were always unscrupulous about the how and have been since at least 2011 when I first noticed they existed.
I honestly don't think the tone has changed substantially.
Here is what ZH is good for: they have stuff before anyone else, because they'll print almost anything. For instance, after San Bernardino those guys had details way before other outlets, because they're willing to go to press with just "some guy overheard this on the police scanner and tweeted it".
So when you read ZH you see stuff first, but you place a big mental asterisk by it until their scoop trickles up the media food chain and starts to get confirmed as real reporters do actual work on it.
I like seeing stuff first, before everyone else gets it, hence my continued regular reading of ZH (again, I keep a 40lb bag of Morton Salt by my desk with the ZH logo on it, though).
That being said, their bearish view is pretty important when it gets confirmed by huge people. For instance, ZH has been beating the drums on high yield debt since summer of last year, then Icahn steps in and make similar comments and takes to task BlackRock CEO about their HY ETF being shady and the underlying market being illiquid. There hasn't been a high yield implosion, but a lot of people are betting there will be sometime in the near future. But maybe there won't be? Everything is a gamble, I've lost plenty of money being too early or too late.
You can get decent trade ideas from ZH, but like you said, 95% of their items have to be taken with a grain of salt. The odd part is that most traders, professional traders, and some hedge fund managers frequent ZH and mostly agree on some of their doom scenarios; but the central banks pump the markets with so much money it's impossible to bet against the S&P. "Don't fight the Fed" is a slogan for a reason.
So have John Mauldin, the New York Times's Dealbook, the Financial Times... There are better places to get your bear-market digest.
I skim it from time to time. Very quickly. If I see something interesting, I look look at the source. If it's credible, e.g. Reuters, I cautiously read. If it isn't, I research it. Once in a while I'll come across novel, credible sources this way. This is the No. 1 way to get value from ZH.
The other time I read ZH is when I have a specific crisis on mind, e.g. Greece/Brazil/Venezuela shitting the pot. ZH throws up a good sense of how the bear market feels. Still terrible analysis. But good sentiment stock.
Which evidence are you referring to? Would you mind sharing some of it?
I prided myself on being one of those people who saw it before it was happening, and had purchased double shorted bank ETF's. I thought I was a genius by "getting news first" and acting on it, and seeing the money I was "making". But then the Government stepped in and said they would not let the banks fail. My position evaporated into thin air.
In fact, I made $225K in 2006 on real estate arbitrage buying into ZH type gloom.
A lot of what ZH publishes still does make sense; it's just that the financial/ponzi schemes the Fed has employed since 2009 haven't busted yet.
I still don't get the pass that's given to the mainstream financial "experts" who all missed 2008.
Since 2006 Gold has out performed the DOW by ~30%, even with the the financial schemes and pushing the national debt to 19 trillion.
In the past 2 years or so I'm finally on a good financial footing but I really think this monetary experiment is coming to an end and I dont think I'm thinking that only from reading doom media.
Hope I'm wrong, because another downturn would be bad for this country.
Everyone knows that this has to end -- not just in doom media but everywhere -- but all smart traders know that being early is the exact same thing as being wrong.
You cannot time whats coming, and unless you're running money for somebody else, you don't have to. The only thing you can do is diversify. I know that this is standard advice and it's not nearly as sexy as betting on The Big One, but having a healthily diversified portfolio is literally the only way to stay sane.
If you just have to buy catastrophe insurance, then treat it like what it is: a small hedge against a long tail eventuality. That means don't bet your lifestyle on it.
For me, the most powerful lesson from the GFC is that /everyone/, without exception, is net long The System, and when you bet against The System you bet against the combined best efforts of the most advanced civilization that this planet has ever produced. That is stupid, so don't do it.
For example, I come from Vancouver. In Vancouver, the 2007 real estate bubble never stopped, wages stayed at their Reno, NV levels. Having Vancouver RE has had about a %30 annualized return for about 15 years. Now an average house is about 1.5-2 million dollars. The housing market is completely irrational, but knowing how it works it might be another 'boom' decade or it might all collapse on itself in the next few years.
If you don't care at all about journalistic integrity, then why not just follow the trending twitter hashtags yourself from their search page?
You'll get your news even faster that way.
There are other sites you can go to if you just want to see anything and everything (and there's always Twitter), but the value of ZH (which I probably should've spelled out in the parent) is that they do an initial pass with their noise filter, and while there's still a ton of noise there's also enough signal there after they've done their thing that it's still worthwhile.
Believe it or not it has a huge following in the finance world due to it often being one of the first ones to break or provide color on important stories.
It's not uncommon at all to see a row of traders with tweet deck open allocating a single column to Zero hedge, they are just that prolific with their output.
The downside of the site is that they tend to have a very big bearish slant though. No one has ever accused them of being neutral.
I hope they continue to run the site. I find it provides a fair bit of value to me.
Less of an insult than some may think. There are significant signals buried beneath the huge noise at 4chan
Most of ZH's reporting is backed by numbers coming from other sources. They also report rumors ahead of everyone else, which seem implausible, but later turn out to be facts and reported by other outlets.
Yes, they have topic selection bias, but so does everyone else.
No question about the color, but do you have an example for those "break on important stories".
For example, this post on Trump's nomination chances [1] draws heavily upon charts produced by Goldman Sachs, presumably for their clients only.
[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-20/can-trump-win-gener...
Edited to add: I also know this because a friend of mine had their report leaked and written about on ZH, leading to a bit of a storm in a teacup at their workplace.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-26/coming-soon-theater...
The fact that all this drama is being publicly aired and used as a weapon does not put Zero Hedge in a good light, it's almost like Bloomberg baited them into this defensive posture.
> Regarding, the actual content of Bloomberg's platform giving voice to a disturbed individual, former drug dealer and alcoholic, we find it particularly amusing as it "accuse" Zero Hedge of being intent on generating profits.
> Coming from Bloomberg we find this not only entertaining but somewhat hypocritical.
> Incidentally, the chart above may explain why none other than our "competitor" Bloomberg decided it was its mission to voice a grievance of a disgruntled former employee who admitted it was his intention to "destroy" Zero Hedge.
For me as a Westerner there are few places where I can read non-mainstream opinions on things like the war in Syria, the oil price and currency wars, the daily SNAFU in the financial worldlike Negative Interest Rate Policy (NIRP).
To be sure, the headlines are often sensationalist but the content often exceeds whatever analysis you can get to read from mainstream media (= the big online newspapers in the US, and Europe).
Here is Zerohedge's response to the above article: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-b...
From their response article: "We are ok with being typecast as "conspiracy theorists" as these "theories" tend to become "conspiracy fact" months to years later. "
Translation: "Yes, we're attacking the competition."
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Reply-To-Comments-Below:
All editors make choices, and to me, this was the wrong choice.
All this does in validate ZeroHedge is a threat and makes Bloomberg look like a wannabe thug.
Beyond that, appears ZeroHedge made something of this disclaimer too: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-b...
This site has long been a bewildering mishmash of doomsaying and cassandra-like apocalyptic predictions - but the other shoe has simply never dropped. During the days when the financial crisis was hot and fresh this brand of naysaying seemed really insightful and prescient - but, in retrospect, it was just something of a firehose of "short the system."
That a lot of analysts read it doesn't make it credible. A lot of politicos read infowars too - it doesn't mean it isn't mostly hyped up garbage.
Far too many of their headlines are too sensationalist and make too many testable claims and predictions - they are chicken little, and the sky simply hasn't fallen.
On the one hand, they can produce some really amazing and compelling content, whether its their own analysis or an analysis of an article from somewhere else on the web. A recent article of memory: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-17/what-just-happened-....
But over the years the site's tone has changed. While they are still dedicated to financial news and insights, they post a lot of survivalist non-sense and it feels more like a far Right wing blog now, advocating you to buy gold in one article that sits below another highlighting proof that the gold market is fixed. I can support a position of reporting on everything and anything, but these inconsistencies and the fact that there is a dearth of articles with viewpoints and analysis from the Left has led me to question their true motives now. They'll also censor you for trying to bring this up in their comments section. A few years ago my account was banned after I called them out for putting up an article stating how some Goldman report was BS, while simultaneously they had up a blog post that used stats from a different Goldman report.
I still visit the site everyday. They still occasionally break some headline stories and you still find some really great articles. But generally it's become an insufferable website.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-01-21/something-blowing-o...
Basically... they were right! (You can cite this as an example of quality reporting or as an example of cherry-picking research...)
Does anyone else feel this is particularly generous?
ZeroHedge is borderline conspiracy theorist nonsense surrounded by occasionally correct financial analysis with a level of accuracy on par with a dart board.
Only time will tell who's "right" in the end!
I travel a fair amount, and it seems like people in other countries don't have an obsession with "news" that so many of my acquaintances in the USA have. I think that one hour a week is about the maximum amount of time anyone should spend on the news - better to spend the time engaging in business, family and friend time, write a book, volunteer with a charity, community involvement, etc.
Might be good entertainment for wannabe daytraders and inexperienced retails, but they're almost always wrong about things...
When I came across zerohedge about 2 years ago, it looked like they were bearish all the time, and right less than half the time. I think people see what's right and don't pay attention to when it's wrong.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-29/full-story-behind-b...
My reading of the [conspiratorial|far-fetched|proto-facist] content on ZeroHedge is that it's not meant to be literal, but a veneer of SHOCK VALUE that serves two purposes. First, it gets readership due to classic clickbait psychology. Second, its mere existence demonstrably proves ZeroHedge is an "alternative" media site undiluted by editorial filters. This distinguishes it from every mainstream media publication, and that alone makes it worth reading (provided you can find some signal worth your time).
The shock value signals to astute readers that ZeroHedge is not a traditional site, and that yes, you SHOULD take everything they say with a grain of salt. But the logical jump from "you should take it with a grain of salt" to "you should ignore it" misses the simple fact that its writers INTEND for the content to be provocative. They WANT you to take it with a grain of salt.
Taking things "with a grain of salt" is GOOD for you. It means you are THINKING CRITICALLY. People should be taking everything with a grain of salt. What alarms me most about ZeroHedge is not its content, but the attempted ostracizing of that content by other publications, as if the shock value justifies ignoring it all together. Incidentally, this is the same smear tactic that mainstream media sites are applying to Donald Trump: he says <thing> we find offensive, therefore <every other thing> he says must be invalid. If we applied this logic to all information, there would be no difference of opinion in the world.
To paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, the person yelling "fire" might be the one worth listening to, and we should always question our own beliefs and fear consensus. To quote him directly, they [0] were "the ones shouting fire when there really was a fire in a very crowded theatre indeed... [W]ho’s going to decide?" [1] [2]
[0] "They" were the socialist party of philadelphia, who opposed the draft of WWI, "on the grounds that military conscription constituted involuntary servitude, which is prohibited by the Thirteenth Amendment.": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schenck_v._United_States
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X3Hg-Y7MugU (thanks to HN commenter in another thread for linking to this today)
[2] http://documents.ariadacapo.net/borrowed/2006_11_christopher...
The BLS numbers are phony. They monkey around with the denominator, so drop-outs from the workforce are not counted. They also count one person losing a good full-time job but gaining multiple part-time jobs as a net positive. Never mind those numbers---all you need to know is that the adult labor force participation rate is at its lowest in about 4 decades.[0] The ratio of average income to home prices is about twice that of the 50s/60s (over 3.3) Also, if unemployment were measured as it was decades earlier, the unemployment number would be much higher. Outside of tech, where tons of money has flowed thanks to the Fed's helicopter money and investors seeking higher returns (as interest rates are ~0), the economy has been doing lousy. Yet all we're told via mainstream sources is that the Fed and Obama saved the day and shutup about it already!
As others have noted, this expansion is long-in-the-tooth, at least by historical standards. Companies' inventories are up, which also signals an economic slowdown in the works. After QE1, QE2, QE3, and bond buying totaling $4 trillion (!) of expansion of the monetary supply, we've had a paltry sub-3% GDP growth (0.5% in the first quarter of this year!). A former Fed board member admitted recently that they "front-loaded" the recovery; indeed, it should be noted that this "recovery" is almost a direct result of the Fed's actions regarding monetary expansion. This also explains the fantastic increase in asset values (classic cars, houses, art, stocks, etc.)
The Fed is a private cartel. It is the third central bank in the history of the U.S., and was created so the banks would no longer be forced to compete with each other. It is not independent of politics (far from it)---for example, Yellen knows she should raise interest rates, but knows that the Democrats will be thrown out of office if she does before 2016 (see the minuscule 25 basis-point increase that caused huge market turmoil late last year), and a Republican would throw her out the day he was sworn in. Even if you don't believe the "conspiracy", the fact of the matter is that central planning is disastrous, and it is especially disastrous when it comes to the price of currency (i.e., interest rates), as that affects everything else in an advanced economy (especially long-term capital investments).
ZH has done a good job keeping us apprised of these developments. They operate under the assumption that the current fiat currently standard cannot survive, and they are right. Of course the timing is virtually impossible, but I (like them) predict a bad recession in the next year or two. Over the longer term, the system will inevitably collapse.
[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2015/07/02/percentage-w...
