Investment Advice from Tom Friedman
As a rule of thumb, i don’t take investment advice from people who have been wrong about everything. That’s why, when I read Tom Friedman’s column urging investors:
I am reluctant to sell China short, not because I think it has no problems or corruption or bubbles, but because I think it has all those problems in spades — and some will blow up along the way (the most dangerous being pollution). But it also has a political class focused on addressing its real problems, as well as a mountain of savings with which to do so (unlike us).
And here is the other thing to keep in mind. Think about all the hype, all the words, that have been written about China’s economic development since 1979. It’s a lot, right? What if I told you this: “It may be that we haven’t seen anything yet.”
…I got worried, because Tom Friedman is ALWAYS wrong.
According to Economist’s View, he’s wrong on cap and trade.
At vanity Fair, they’ve got Friedman’s five biggest mistakes, including a pretty dumb prediction about China:
In October of 2000, Friedman decided that the Chinese regime would soon find itself threatened by a major unemployment crisis caused by an influx of American wheat and sugar into that country. In fact, American wheat and sugar failed to make any inroads whatsoever, while Chinese unemployment figures (however unreliable they may be) remained at low levels for a period of seven years.
He’s also big on China’s autocracy, which honestly isn’t all that surprising.
If you google “tom friedman wrong, you get more than 700,000 results in .11 seconds. that’s a lot of wrong.
Tom’s wrongness has also been deadly to millions: I’m speaking, of course, about his advocacy for invading Iraq, summed up in three words: “Suck. On. This.”:
And now here comes Little Tommy Friedman, saying of China, “What if I told you this: “It may be that we haven’t seen anything yet.””
But Tommy has been saying “It may be that we haven’t seen anything yet” for years: in fact, he says it so much, he’s had an entire term named after him: the Friedman Unit,
“a tongue-in-cheek neologism… in reference to the discovery by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) of journalist Thomas Friedman’s repeated use of “the next six months” as the time period in which, according to Friedman, “we’re going to find out…whether a decent outcome is possible” in the Iraq War… Friedman had been making these six-month predictions since November 2003.”
So if Tom Friedman’s saying “don’t short China”, I think basic common sense says you should question that advice. Stopped clocks are right twice a day, but it has been far longer than that since Tom Friedman was right about anything.
Personal Not to the New York Times: I can make up shit just as well as Tom Friedman, and for a fraction of the price. Just sayin’…
