Bernard Condon

After Stock Market's Disastrous Day, AP Pair Makes Several Wishful, Fact-Challenged Assertions
By Tom Blumer | August 21, 2015 | 11:47 PM EDT

Tonight's report at the Associated Press in the wake of Wall Street's disastrous day isn't quite an Animal House moment — "Remain Calm! All Is Well!" — but it's more than fair to say that the wire service's Matthew Craft and Bernard Condon allowed quite a bit of wishful thinking into their writeup.

In late June, I noted that the AP's Ken Sweet asked a very important question about China ("IS THERE A POINT WHERE I SHOULD GET WORRIED?"), and failed to answer it. He also claimed that "The biggest concern is whether the drop in China's stock market will cause the country's economy to slow." The headline and opening sentence in tonight's AP dispatch attempted to maintain that false appearance (bolds are mine):

Absurd AP: Birth Dearth Since Financial Crisis Is Causing Slow Workforce Growth Now
By Tom Blumer | May 7, 2014 | 11:03 PM EDT

If I didn't know any better, I might have thought, based on an Associated Press report tonight by business writer Bernard Condon prepared with the help of four others, that governments everywhere had reinstituted child labor for those as young as six years old.

That's the only way to support the claims Condon made about how the birth dearth in the developed world driven by the 2008 financial crisis is responsible for the current worldwide economic malaise. This desperate grasping at straws is apparently necessarily because the press will never blame the ineffectiveness of Keynesian fiscal policies and national banks' interventions in the developed world's economies, which are really the culprits. Excerpts from Condon's calamity follow the jump (bolds are mine):

AP Biz Writer on Good Stocks to Buy: 'One Good Bet: The Jobless Aren't Likely to Find Work Anytime Soon'
By Tom Blumer | July 9, 2011 | 8:46 PM EDT

While Associated Press Economics writers like Christopher Rugaber and Paul Wiseman, as seen in a post this morning (at NewBusters; at BizzyBlog), talk of "baffled economists" and a job market that is "defying history," one AP writer, in discussing stocks which have done well in this economy, has revealed what employment prospects really are with quite un-baffling certainty from the point of view of those who have to put their money where their expectations are, i.e., investors.

The wire service's Bernard Condon cited a pawn shop operator, a payday lender, a debt-collection firm, and a rent-to-own outfit as companies which have outperformed the market and are expected to continue doing so. The reason for the expectation is found in the title of this post, which is also seen in the following excerpt from Condon's composition:

AP's Condon Rips S&P's Record, Ignores Fannie Mae's, Freddie Mac's Systematic Mortgage Securities Deceptions
By Tom Blumer | April 19, 2011 | 12:20 AM EDT

As night follows day, the press is beginning to go after a business entity which had the nerve to do its job and call attention to Uncle Sam's dire fiscal situation.

Standard and Poor's is presumably not 100% populated with angels, but it didn't deserve the gratuitous and ignorant shots fired at it this evening by the Associated Press's Bernard Condon and an "expert" he quoted. In attempting to tar the firm, Condon acted as if the mortgage-lending mess was the creation of "banks" which marketed mortgage-backed securities and asleep at the switch ratings agencies. He didn't once mention Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, the fiasco's Democratic crony-run uber-culprits, which for 15 years consistently deceived the markets about the quality of the already marginal loans underlying the securities they issued .

Here are selected paragraphs from Condon's cracked creation, including a headline which gives away a resentment that the ratings agencies are still actually able to do what they were designed to do (bold is mine):

AP: Both Brown Win and Obama Anti-Bank Attacks Examples of 'Populism'
By Tom Blumer | January 24, 2010 | 11:44 PM EST
http://i739.photobucket.com/albums/xx40/mmatters/e49725_Scotty_012020100108-ObamaJobs_full_380It's amazing how Bernard Condon and Tim Paradis of the Associated Press managed to hang the same label on totally opposite political positions in their report on the situation in the stock market late this afternoon.

According to the AP pair, Scott Brown's U.S. Senate win in Massachusetts was due to a "wave of populism," at the same time as President Obama is supposedly planning to use "populist attacks" to save his party's congressional majority in the fall elections. One of those employments of "populism" has to be wrong.

Additionally, they write that it's Scott Brown's type of populism that caused investors to sell heavily in the middle of last week, but that it's Barack Obama's type of populism that caused it to plunge even further during its remainder.

Got that?

Look at the bright side: As you'll see, the wire service at least got the headline right.

Here are the first five paragraphs of the AP pair's schizophrenic report, followed by a few later ones (bolds are mine):