The BBC, which seems to be relishing the current financial crisis, reports on its website, under the headline ‘US failure hits Europe shares‘, that “European share indexes have been volatile in Tuesday trading” after the US Congress rejected its government’s rescue plan yesterday. Other headlines on the site tell us that ‘Shares slump after rescue bid fails’, and that ‘Asia stocks fall after US failure’.
Now I’m no expert on this, and clearly there is potential for great volatility over the next few days, but it seems to me from the articles appended to the scary headlines that many markets in the rest of the world outside the US have so far been quite robust in the wake of yesterday’s news. The UK’s FTSE, for example, was up 0.18% by midday today, France’s Cac was down just 0.2%, and Germany’s Dax by 0.9%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose by 0.8%, with just Japan’s Nikkei really struggling, down 4%. Even some banks, including Lloyds TSB and HSBC, have seen increases in their share prices. And all this despite Wall Street’s biggest ever one-day points fall yesterday.
That doesn’t look like meltdown, or even volatility, to my untrained eye, and it would be nice to see the BBC’s headlines and commentary matching the facts it presents in its own articles. On last night’s Ten O’Clock News the Beeb criticised George’s Bush’s alarmist comments about panic in the markets. Would that the organisation practised what it preached…
Update at 14:49: The offending headline, though not the text, has now been removed from the BBC website and replaced with George’s Bush’s latest warning of the dire consequences that will follow rejection of his plan. Why he or the BBC think any sane person would listen to his advice in all this remains a mystery, but at least the latter has toned down its own scaremongering slightly.
