Fear Marketeers

This got my attention when I heard it on Marketplace.

Financial advice from...Lindsay Lohan?

”So I guess it wasn’t too surprising to read this tweet today: “Have you guys seen food and gas prices lately? U.S. $ will soon be worthless if the Fed keeps printing money!”

Of COURSE the tweet was from…Lindsay Lohan. She later clarified to her two-million-plus followers that it was a sponsored tweet.”

I know this won’t surprise some, but I don’t have any idea who Lindsay Lohan is. The only thing I know about her is that she is famous (for unknown reasons) and she goes to jail a lot (which is the only time I hear her name.) What got my attention was why someone would pay to send this message to Ms. Lohan’s 2 million Twitter followers (who, I assume, are financially unsophisticated people.)

I had to go find that information on Mediaite.

Lawrence O’Donnell Reveals Lindsay Lohan’s Federal Reserve Tweet Was Paid For

”O’Donnell explained how the tweet got there– it was paid for by the National Inflation Association, a group that “pumps up tiny unknown stocks that deal with gold and silver.””

Frankly, I was surprised that it wasn’t somebody like Freedom Works.

Oh well. In case you missed it, it all reminded me of this blog post from Paul Krugman.

The Old Superstition

”And after surveying the wreckage all around him, he declares that the cause of the depression was excessive government intervention, and the remedy, the thing needed to restore that all-essential confidence was … drum roll .. a return to the gold standard.”

”I was originally going to end this post by saying something about stupidity, but that’s not right: the people at the BIS aren’t stupid. What’s going on here is something different and worse: we’re seeing the desire for conventional respectability outweighing the lessons of history; we’re seeing vague prejudice (prejudice that just so happens to serve the interests of rentiers) trumping analysis.”

How’s an economist supposed to compete with a carnival barker and a sideshow?

Don Brown
June 30, 2011