This is the first in nourishing obscurity's new series of Punditwatch.Delighted with Private Eye's lambasting of Anatole Kaletsky whom some have been unkind enough to describe as a charlatan. This has been an ongoing thing for some of us but at the time, people saw the Kaletsky bashing as the rantings of a few malcontents.
Now the Eye has taken him to task over his economic forecasting [Hackwatch, Issue 1220, p5, followed up on p4 of Issue 1221]:
No need to worry, he assured his readers. "This crisis will probably turn out to be another storm in a teacup."
The thing is, Mr. Kaletsky must mislead as part of his brief for his backers and so we get:
Mr Kaletsky's other arguments – which, to his credit, are more focused on the first quarter alone – are, at best, misleading. He suggests, for example, that the UK's problems effectively lie within the measurement of export and import volumes, pointing out that domestic demand rose 0.9 per cent in the first quarter relative to the final quarter of last year. Yet this is a highly selective use of data.
Perhaps the Independent is biased against the man. The message boards have this:
It's not just the useful idiot Kaletsky who is pushing the reckless option of government backed mortgages. It seems that lunatic prime minister Brown wants them too ...
... and blogger Alice Cook says:
If Anatole thinks that there can be a debt financed pick up in economic growth, then he hasn't learnt anything in the last 18 months.
... to which readers commented thusly:
Anonymous said...Kaletsky is a fool.
- dearieme said...
I think you'll find that he hasn't learnt anything in the last 18 years.
In January this year, for example, he called the credit crisis "almost over". As stock markets tumbled in July he concluded another piece suggesting problems were overblown by declaring that "market prices are sometimes plain wrong".
What Kaletsky failed to mention in these and all his other weekly columns, as well as in several appearances as an economics pundit on TV programmes including the BBC's Newsnight, is that since 1999 he has been chief economist of a financial services company called GaveKal.
The firm, whose name is an amalgam of Kaletsky's and French co-founder Charles Gave's names, was initially set up as a pure research operation but in 2006 moved into fund management.
Gavekal is known for its misplaced bullishness but to find criticism from within the industry itself, it's by definition going to be indirect:
We've heard iTulip described as GaveKal's evil twin brother. Both firms strive to be rigorous and consistent, but where GaveKal surveys the financial markets scene and sees a glass half full, iTulip sees a glass of Kool-Aid.
Their theories do not find great acceptance in the economist community, which is a far cry from describing them as actively evil and yet the readership of the Times and others should be, at the very least, circumspect about Mr Kaletsky and pals.
"Gavekal" is a dreadful name, but I suppose that they combined their surnames because if they'd combined their christian names they'd have ended up with Arsehole.
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