Bill Black: Deflation Dementia

Posted on April 2, 2014 by Yves Smith

Yves here. This piece by Bill Black not only does a great job of kneecapping some typically poor MSM reporting, but it’s also valuable as a high-level overview of the insanity of European economic policies.

By Bill Black, the author of The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own One and an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. Originally published at New Economic Perspectives

There must be some café in Brussels where all the most inept U.S. financial journalists meet with to get their take on eurozone deflation. Regular readers know that I am a strong critic of much of what passes for financial journalism, but there are special qualities to the U.S. coverage of the topic of eurozone deflation. It is so homogenous and its logic is so internally inconsistent that it is breathtaking that so many journalists can repeat the same demented “logic” no matter how many times we explain that it is facially nonsensical.

The latest example of this genre is an AP story that has already been reproduced by elite media without even a scintilla of scrutiny. Here’s how the AP begins its tale.