Bloggasm

Don’s 25-year career as an entrepreneur, executive, investment manager and commentator has been built around his passion for the application of technology and innovation to the challenge of investing.

Prior to founding Trend Macrolytics with David Gitlitz, Don was Vice Chairman and co-Chief Investment Officer of Barclays Global Investors, where he worked with the world’s largest institutional investors to create innovative indexing and quantitative investment management strategies.

After Barclays, Don was CEO and co-founder of MetaMarkets.com, and manager of the pathbreaking OpenFund — the world’s first mutual fund to disclose all its holdings and trading activity in real-time on the Internet.

Don was the inventor of the POSIT ECN, and founder of Investment Technology Group at Jefferies & Company. He has been a hedge fund manager and an options market maker on the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Pacific Stock Exchange, and the New York Stock Exchange.

Don runs a web-log based on his forthcoming book, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid — in which he examines the obstacles to wealth creation by ordinary people. He is the author of Index Options and Futures: The Complete Guide, and editor of Portfolio Insurance: The Guide to Dynamic Hedging, both published by Wiley & Company.

Don’s columns are published weekly on SmartMoney.com and he contributes frequently to National Review Online, where he writes the Krugman Truth Squad column. He appears regularly on CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company” and on Bloomberg TV, CNN and Fox News. He was formerly a columnist for TheStreet.com and Business 2.0. His commentaries have been published in the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Pensions & Investments, the American Spectator, the San Jose Mercury News, and the Detroit News.

Simon Owens: Do you think that political blogs are able to create an effective checks and balance on the Mainstream Media? Do they tend to ignore bloggers when they point out mistakes in their reporting?

Don Luskin: The MSM is very defensive of its credibility, and is loathe to point out serious errors no matter who points them out. It’s all the worse when upstart media competitors like bloggers point out the errors.

Simon Owens: Many mainstream journalists grow frustrated with bloggers because there doesn’t seem to be much of a filtration system to their reporting. Do you think there’s an validity to this frustration?

Don Luskin: Yes and no. It’s true that blogs are unfiltered. But editorial filters are themselves unfiltered. You are always reading words that are the product of somebody’s judgment. Who filters the filter? At least with blogs there are no illusions. You aren’t told there is some wise editor who somehow knows that only truth will get published.

Simon Owens: Conservative political bloggers have grown furious with the New York Times for its recent set of leaks, yet at the same time one of the most important things about democratic governments is that they must remain as transparent as humanly possible. When is it ok to publish a leak and when should newspapers hold back?

Don Luskin: It surprises me that there aren’t more objections to the leaks themselves, but rather to the fact that the leaked content gets published. If government can’t keep its own secrets, whose fault is that really? From the standpoint of a media outlet, if some government official is telling you a story, how can you think the government doesn’t want you to publish it? You are between a rock and a hard place if one government official tells you the information and another begs you not to publish it, as appears to be the case with the SWIFT surveillance.

Simon Owens: You often refer to the New York Times as the “elite.” What do you think causes this elitist atmosphere in journalism?

Don Luskin: It is literally a cultural elite, with its members drawn from filtration processes including Ivy League schools, best families, and so on. It is also an elite in the sense that the Times is indisputably a tastemaker and trendsetter – small number of people with enormous influence. But when you come right down to it, most media have the property of being elitist simply because they are one-way “I talk you listen” propositions, with enormous capital costs creating barriers to entry. Of course blogs change all that. Though even within the blog world, there will always be an elite – the most popular blogs with the widest audiences. They tend to act like the MSM because they, too, are one-way “I talk you listen” propositions, and that always goes to one’s head.

Simon Owens: As someone who has appeared on live television, are there many differences between the televised political world and the political blogosphere?

Don Luskin: There are all the differences in the world. Blogging is personal and natural, and can be a reflection of one’s own personality and style. Television is a highly controlled and structured environment in which guests must fit into very narrow time slots, and cannot really express themselves because they are always responding to surprise questions asked by someone else. There are elements in common, though. Television succumbs to the temptation to be sensationalistic, in a quest for a wide audience. Blogs often do the same thing.

Simon Owens: What are the five blogs you’d recommend to supplement the reading of your own?

Don Luskin: I always get a laugh from Best of the Web Today by Jim Taranto. For people interested in economics/politics, I’d suggest Greg Mankiw’s blog, EconoPundit, Reality is Unreal, and George Reisman’s blog.

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