Financial News in the Bizarro World

You may recall an interesting episode of “Seinfeld” back in the mid-90’s when Jerry & friends suddenly find themselves in a “Bizarro World.” The episode follows a series of situations in which an alternate version of reality is running parallel to their real lives. The concept draws upon Jerry’s love of Superman and the term comes from a character (Bizarro) that is the polar opposite of Superman and who lives in “Bizarro’s World” – a place that seems very similar to earth, but actually operates quite differently.

I was thinking about that old episode this week as we watch the financial news and I can’t believe just how crappy the traditional financial media actually is – it feels like I’m in a Bizarro World!

What kind of alternate universe are we living in when we can find more accurate financial news from John Stewart on the Daily Show (Comedy Central) than can find on CNBC?

This was highlighted recently as we watch TONS of financial media types defending high frequency trading (HFT) on their shows. Not familiar with HFT? Thankfully this one is easy to explain – it’s just a bunch of lightning fast computers that skim fractions of pennies from every market trade tens of thousands of times per day.

This “Bizarro News” is all happening in light of the new Michael Lewis book Flash Boys where he makes the allegations that the stock market it rigged.  Lewis has a pretty infamous segment on 60 minutes where he alleges the US markets are all rigged.

Given that we can’t seem to find any credible coverage in our “Bizzaro World” financial news we thought you might enjoy a comedy duo (Clarke and Dawe) out of Australia who are actually very good at breaking down some other topics that are also going on in the financial world… Please enjoy these short video clips – We think you’ll get a kick out of them… and you might actually get the real story.

Quantitative Easing

European Debt Crisis

Categorized in: Blog

This post was written by Conscient Capital