Money shows should not treat finance as entertainment by turning the buying of stocks into a joke or by turning a discussion of serious economic situations into an occasion for groundless argument.  These shows discuss issues directly involved in the managing of people’s money, pensions, savings, and 401ks. The networks that produce these shows, then, have a moral responsibility to treat the subject matter with the seriousness that it requires. 

To fulfill this obligation, the networks should do two things.  First, the network should only invite experts to discuss financial topics.  Participation should be limited to those who have actually worked in the field that they will be discussing.  All too often, financial reporters who have little or no work experience in a particular field are invited to comment on very serious economic issues and their presence drowns out the founded insights of real experts who should be listened to.  Second, the networks should see themselves as obliged to foster a healthy debate founded on factual evidence and cogent argument, and not gut feeling.  The moral obligation of these networks should be a constant pursuit of the truth.

Just because they’re on television doesn’t mean that they’re experts. Watching this video from Fox News Cavuto On Business, August 18th, 2007, we have five experts talking about the economy: Ben Stein, Tracy Burns, Charles Payne, Stuart Varney, and Peter Schiff.

Because of hindsight, we are able to analyze what these “experts” are saying through the retrospective lens of a housing market collapse, a CDS scandal, the ravages of rampant unemployment, and the price of enormous government bailouts to prevent worldwide economic collapse. In other words, these five “experts” sit on the edge of economic collapse, but for some reason all but one is extraordinarily optimistic. If they are experts, why is it that they don’t all see the storm clouds on the horizon?