The Fortune Hunters: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation

Citation

Mercado, M.I. (2001), "The Fortune Hunters: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation", The Bottom Line, Vol. 14 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2001.17014cae.001

The Fortune Hunters: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation

Edited by Kay A. Cassell and Marina’I.’Mercado

The Fortune Hunters: Inside Wall Street's Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation

Kurtz, H.The Free PressNew York2000Keywords: Stock markets, Investment, Media

At the end of this book one can only wonder whom to trust with investment funds. Howard Kurtz has confirmed what we already suspected – that Internet and television commentators and analysts have not only reported the news to a financially hungry public but also have made news in such ways as to provide huge gains for some investors and high losses for others. According to Kurtz, the national obsession with trading stocks as the way to financial gain has created an almost insatiable demand for financial information no matter its source.

Kurtz points out that journalists who cover politics are by definition outsiders. No single reporter can affect White House policy or a candidate's campaign through analysis or commentary. But in today's business arena financial journalists are active players. As Kurtz states, "they make things happen instantaneously, and their impact is gauged not by subjective polls but by the starker standard of stock prices. A single negative story, true or not, can send a company's share price tumbling in a matter of minutes." According to Kurtz, the extraordinary influence of financial journalists affects not only the corporate bottom line but also the hard-earned money of millions of average investors. Journalists are manipulated every day by CEOs, by Wall Street, by brokerage firms, by fund managers, as they practise the art of "spin", "measuring their success not in votes but in dollars, not in campaign seasons but in minute-by-minute prices". According to Kurtz, there is one inescapable problem: none of these savvy journalists knows anything. They traffic in a strange soup-like mixture of facts, gossip and rumour as they speak with each other, milk each other for information and belittle each other as they desperately search for someone in the club who knows about a stock, any stock, which will be the buzz of tomorrow. "They are modern day fortune tellers, promising untold riches as they peer into perpetually hazy crystal balls."

The case studies which Kurtz narrates in this book are mind boggling. It seems that in this web of incestuous relationships everyone has an angle. Kurtz points out that, in the course of researching this book, he found out that the seductive dance between the mavens of the media and the money men, between those who predict and those who gamble high sums, was mesmerising. As billions of dollars moved on rumours, leaks, nods, winks, head fakes and hoaxes, the world of Wall Street spin was like a three-dimensional chess game with no accountability.

Kurtz concludes that, because of the information explosion, Wall Street is being squeezed as never before. An investor can now download the latest data without an investment advisor, buy stock online without a broker and follow its minute-by-minute progress on cable television and the Internet, reducing the need for the highly paid middleman. In this brave new world of investing the responsibility is on the shoulders of the investor. The investor can still choose to follow blindly the advice of this or that financial guru, without having researched the stocks. Given the nature of modern financial life, the fortune tellers will always be with us. But, as Kurtz cautions, "those who blindly follow them have no one to blame but themselves".

Kurtz does not spare anyone in the financial guru business. His exposé of the Wall Street media machine, conflicts of interest, journalistic hype, cosy friendships and whispered leaks that have moved the market up and down is formidable. You will never look at the financial system in the same benign way as before. I highly recommend this book for those who want to participate actively in their investment present and future.

Marina I. MercadoMercy College