Look Howard, the real cesspool is the sell-side. (Sell-side equals the major brokerage houses. The salespeople [brokers] who move merchandise.) Why not outright praise those who are trying to clean it up? Why not praise those who take the craft of journalism seriously enough to attack the whole sell-side/mutual-fund edifice that works to promote both good and bad stocks? And why not identify who is being manipulated in the media and expose them?
It’s the takeaway of the book, more than the book itself, that I find most disturbing. You make charges that the media are manipulated and that money managers manipulate. Then you spend a huge chunk of time talking about Mark Haines, Joe Kernen, and David Faber, and of course yours truly. To the uninformed, trying to figure out whether to read the book, you would have to believe that the manipulators are none other than us! Sure, once they get in, they will discover that the manipulators that you have been talking about endlessly on your tour are not us at all. In fact, maybe we are the good guys.
But who are the bad guys then? Who in the media is getting it wrong? Who on the money-management side is manipulating? Tell us, Howard. Write another book and nail the sons of bitches. As of this writing, you’ve done nothing more than insinuate someone is doing it and created a global book-tour impression that it is me.
