Matt Buck’s Hack Cartoons Diary

Keep Calm It's Gordon Brown © Matt Buck Hack Cartoons

The Keep Calm and Carry On poster is hard to resist as an image. Jonathan Calder taks about the power of visual messaging here and James Graham takes a contrary view here.

Well, for once US government policy is following a example from the UK – and so it’s all together down the road of inventing new money. The US Federal Reserve banks will be buying large amounts of public debt with new paper assets. Here we are learning to know this process as quantitative easing, or, queasing for short. In the US, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of banks, Ben Bernanke, prefers to call it credit easing.

The initial amounts are very large indeed, although, typically, the FT have found a nice way of bringing it down to earth with an illustration (although I see they’ve found it from Mint.com).

Inventing money on this scale often acts against the value of the national currency and makes, in simple terms, paper money worth less.

UPDATED: 19th March 2009. The BBC is reporting declines in the value of the US dollar against a range of other international currencies. This is important because the US dollar is often though of as the global ‘reserve’ currency. This means that lots of national and corporate investors have traditionally liked to hold a lot of wealth in dollars because it has felt a secure investment.

One brilliant piece of visual journalism about what is happening in the UK economy. Kudos to Paddy Allen and Simon Rogers at the Guardian.

Here is the text of a post made under Robert Peston’s financial reporting blog at the BBC. The thread was the_goldman_infallibility_myth made by Robert on 17th March 2009.

>>>>>>>>>>>

131. At 00:14am on 17 Mar 2009, spur22 wrote:

Respect to poster No1 BasaltRocky who delivered a fine fisking, worth rereading for its analysis of the really major political and economic decision which was taken in the autumn of last year.

The following link leads to an an attempt to put what has happened in the financial world into a piece of picture reporting.

[Unsuitable/Broken URL removed by Moderator]

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I wasn’t able to get this published by anything other than a small print run magazine. This was a shame because I think it says something about what has happened to our country.

>>>>>>>>>>>

Like many blog posts nowadays this original post used an inline link which lead back to this site – and to this post. My original message went to the moderators at the BBC – and stayed there until the direct link was edited out. I think this is interesting because the posted link at my site uses text, but, is mainly picture, and I am clear about what it is I make and do here.

But, while I was waiting to see what happened in Mr Peston’s moderation process, I thought I’d ask a question.

This was the new post I made at No.145 using a link to a new blog post I made here because the original was in Beeb moderation.

>>>>>>>>>>>

145. At 09:15am on 17 Mar 2009, spur22 wrote:

All about post #131
http://bit.ly/aUdXR

>>>>>>>>>>>

At the time, I hadn’t had any contact from the moderators about why a link to this blog and a drawing was any sort of problem, so, I posted one more question about it.

>>>>>>>>>>>

157. At 10:33am on 17 Mar 2009, spur22 wrote:

What is happening to post #131?
More about it here…
http://bit.ly/aUdX

>>>>>>>>>>

I got an email from a BBC moderator at 16.37 refering to one of these subsequent questions, explaining politely, they were terming subsequent link(s) as spam. There was no reason given as to why the original direct inline link was edited.

I can’t see myself, other than the use of a picture, what the difference is between my inline link to a blog post at this site and many of the other inline links which are consistently run from Robert Peston’s blog conversations. (See posts No6, 18, 36, 50, 81, 115, 135 and 141 in the same thread).

Of course, it is the BBC’s house and their rules, but it does make me wonder if there is a difference in the corporation’s moderation policy towards words which express opinions about the financial crisis and pictures which do the same thing.

Drawing.

I am asking in the spirit of discovery to try and find out if there are differences in the use of BBC moderation towards words and pictures. This is because both forms of communication can tell a story or, have a point of view.

I’m testing the theory on Robert Peston’s blog – the post in question is No 131 under the Goldman Sachs infallibility post. I am spur 22.

(This post was edited for awful sentence structure and grammar at 10.25am on the same day)

Red-Handed fat cat © Matt Buck Hack Cartoons

This is just one of the chores which has to be done and although there is some heavy duty talk about the deployment of Toilet Duck going on in the financial and political worlds, it’s useful to watch who is doing the actual cleaning. This is something I might look at in one of my drawings this week.

In the UK, Conservative party leader David Cameron has apologised for his party’s part in the ’cosy economic consensus’ about the behaviour of the financial industry in the past decade. This was a smart political move because apologies cost little, if you are not PM, and it makes the prime minister and former chancellor look even more tin-eared and stubborn than he is. Both sides of the great UK party political divide have reaction to it which is available here and here.

Politically, it also pays to remember the national budget is not far away. This is very important to the government as it will be one of their last chances to throw cash at the electorate before they have to have an election. Even if Labour can’t win, they can, perhaps, reduce the scale of any defeat.

In the US, some rather brilliant cleaning fluids have been applied by Jon Stewart and the team on the Daily Show in a a series of recent clips which demonstrate what journalism can and should be. I can’t recommend the half hour of your life you should spend watching the recent set of interviews with CNBC Business Analyst Jim Cramer too highly. And the FT’s Alphaville agrees.

Reposted: 12th March 2009

The latest new report from Bloomberg on Bernie Madoff’s life sentence is here