On the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex
The Media That Surrounds Us
Picture yourself for a moment in one of those extremely crowded open-air markets full of venders, selling everything from vegetables to live chickens to knitted sweaters, and you’re trying to make your way through twice a day, every day, to get to work. A brightly colored handmade blanket obstructs your left-side vision, while on your right a bearded man in a robe appears to conduct an unseen orchestra in the air, shouting at high volume about his cheap calculators for sale. This is what all of us navigate, every day, from the Internet, radio, television, and newspapers.
Financial media bombards us like this open-air market. They tug at our sleeves. Their strobe lights flicker at our eyes.
“Come this way.” “Have a look.” “My friend, my friend, come under this curtain and join me for a cup of tea.”
This mélange of oily salespeople, pirates, preachers, and circus clowns all offer a self-serving pitch.
When you work in finance, as I did, you quickly recognize that everyone who appears on financial media has something to sell. Those folks on television, radio, and online are not reasonable, helpful, guides to building wealth. They are not your friends. These are people hawking their wares.
The bond fund billionaire who inevitably concludes his monthly newsletter with the reasons we should buy bonds? He’s selling his product, which happens to be bond mutual funds.
The Wall Street analyst who argues passionately and intelligently that all of her models indicate the energy and retail sectors are fundamentally cheap on a historical PE basis, and it’s time to jump into energy and retail stocks with both feet? Trust me, you can forget about understanding PE ratios, because you don’t need to understand a word she is saying. All you need to know is that she’s selling something.
The permanently pessimistic hedge fund manager with a doom-and-gloom story about how the entire financial system will likely collapse next year? He’s selling his product too, which is a hedge fund designed to make money when the market goes down.
The handsome insurance executive on your screen seemingly concerned about the dwindling Social Security fund, furrowing his brow about the need for individual retirement planning through annuities? You got it. He’s selling.
Selling, selling, selling.
The Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex
I call this open-air market the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex. Like the Military Industrial Complex before it, the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex menaces our society. By keeping us credulous, or pessimistic, or pumped full of false confidence, this complex blocks us from building wealth.
Notice for a moment that the “experts” I’m warning you against, who are really salespeople in disguise, all come from the respectable worlds of journalism, money management, insurance, and banking. They are not fundamentally bad people, any more than the bearded guy shouting in the open-air market is a bad person. They are at the top of the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex pyramid, and their job is to sell to you, rather than help you understand your financial world.
There is an even worse set of hucksters below the respectable ones, the ones who sell online “free seminars on house flipping,” books with the words “secrets” and “millionaire” in the title, or pitch you on late night “increase your cash flow” classes. They are distinctly worse, depending as they do on exploitative, fraudulent pitches. But in a sense they are so obviously bad that I’m less focused on warning you about them.
I really mean to warn you about the seemingly reputable ones, the ones pretending to offer “expertise” when really they are pitching their products.
How can a person like you, someone who has not worked in finance, distinguish the buskers from the truth-tellers?
Throughout this book I will help you recognize truth when you see it. When you adopt the attitudes of a wealthy person—modesty, skepticism, and optimism—you will find yourself able to skip right past the open-air market of carny barkers.
This book is a map to a quiet, safe, well-lit street you hadn’t noticed before, that will get you there and back, faster. This book aims to turn down the volume on all that unnecessary noise.
Do I Really Have to Stop Participating in the Financial Infotainment Industrial Complex?
But wait, you say, the open-air market is fun. What if you enjoy watching MSNBC and Fox Business News, or that guy who makes the whistles and honking clown noises while he keeps up a steady patter about stocks he’s supposedly “buying” this week? What if you enjoy the heart-pumping rush of hitting “Enter” on your computer or phone to send a buy order through your stock-trading platform?
That’s fine, I get it. Fun is fun. When I’m on vacation in another country, I like wandering slowly through open-air markets as well. But as you read this book, keep in mind that that adrenalin rush has nothing to do with getting wealthy, and instead is a form of entertainment.
If you don’t mind losing a little bit of your money sitting down for a cup of tea under the vender’s tent, then go for it. It is fun. But just so you know: it’s the opposite of getting wealthy.
What’s Up with This Media Critique Anyway?
Why do I care so much about thrusting my financial media critique in the beginning of a book about getting wealthy?
I care because you can’t hope to adopt the attitudes of a wealthy person unless you understand the wrong messages we get surrounded by all day, every day.
We need to develop a very strong defense mechanism against the wrong attitudes, being sold to us all day long. When you do build that defense mechanism against the media—when you become modest, skeptical, and optimistic—wealth will follow.