Money manager Hussman likens CNBC to 'Gomer Pyle'

Zeroing in on a 15-year trend of increasing levels of “irresponsible speculation” by investors, money manager John Hussman places much of the responsibility in the lap of CNBC. In his March 8 weekly market comment, after identifying the market as being overvalued and pontificating about a deleveraging cycle, Mr. Hussman unloaded some serious ammo on “widely viewed financial programming that is riddled with cartoonish content that encourages short-term thinking and speculation (buy-buy-buy! sell-sell-sell! Boo-yah!).” Mr. Hussman, president of Hussman Investment Trust, titled the week's comment “The Rubber Hits the Road.” But under the subheading of “Can we rely on investor myopia?” he begins to take specific shots at the most animated corner of financial reporting. “During the late 1990s bubble, it struck me that the discourse on CNBC was remarkably similar to the sort of discourse that I had read from news archives preceding the 1929 crash,” he wrote, taking issue with the brand of analysis frequently seen on TV. “The focus of analysts on the short-term ups and downs of economic and earnings reports has become such a mainstay of financial news that it's not at all clear to me that investor even recognize how devoid the current financial discourse is of real analysis,” Mr. Hussman added. He derided the sound-bite nature of the analysis most TV viewers receive and said that reporting about quality of earnings, cyclicality of profit margins and market saturation is what matters over the long run. “To watch a half-hour of CNBC today is like watching an old episode of Gomer Pyle (Well, surprise, surprise, surprise!),” he wrote.