Paul Krugman’s phony bankruptcy: a history

Toni Straka lives in Vienna, Austria. He’s the 48-year-old founder and publisher of the Prudent Investor blog, the subtitle of which reads, “CHRONICLING THE GLOBAL DEBT EXCESS SINCE 2005.” A recent piece from the Austrian magazine Format caught Straka’s attention — it spoke of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman’s filing for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. That’s a slam-dunk post for Straka. “This is the birthplace of Austrian economics,” says Straka. “It was just too good of a story that the prototypical Keynesian follower, Krugman, had declared bankruptcy. That was just too saucy a story for us.” That’s not to say Straka didn’t check Google. He did, and found not a lot of hits for the story. “They have a scoop,” he concluded, before putting the story on Prudent Investor. Prudent Investor — “one of the early and few warners about the U.S. housing bubble,” Straka says — has some reach. “I’m being syndicated and aggregated in more feeds than I could remember,” Straka says. One of the feeds that pulls in the Prudent Investor is knit together by a California company named Financial Content, which delivers stock quotes and financial information and news to its clients’ websites. And one of those clients is Boston.com, a portal that presents content from the Boston Globe. Wing Yu, the CEO of Financial Content, says that his people generate absolutely no news, no content. They merely grab it, wrangle it and push it onto websites. “We’re strictly a tech company,” Yu says. “We don’t have any editorial oversight.” Read the rest at http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2013/03/11/paul-krugmans-phony-bankruptcy-a-history/