Felix Salmon
pestering preening potentates
Adventures in causality, WSJ edition
An eagle-eyed reader spotted this pair of headlines on the WSJ home page this morning:
It seems that the dollar is falling because oil prices are going up, and oil prices are going up because the dollar is falling. Clever!
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One of the salutary effects of volatility is the occasional appearance of two headlines at the same time in which the same cause is said to have triggered both the rally and the drop. It’s been a couple months since I’ve seen that, though; the end of the world isn’t what it used to be.
that is a lot financial journalism, including reuters’. when you don’t know why things happen or can’t find anything interesting to peg a market event to, just shove two different events together, joining them with an ‘as’ or ‘amid’.
reporting can be pretty boring sometimes.