Front Page Economics

Backtracking on Safety

“…171 There had been 126 people on the rig when the well blew out. 172 In the confusion, no one yet knew exact counts, but conspicuously missing were those working the drill floor. * * * *…”

“…It is also critical (as described in greater length in Chapter 8) that companies implement and maintain a pervasive top-down safety culture (such as the ones described by the ExxonMobil and Shell CEOs at the Commission's hearing on November 9, 2010) that reward employees and contractors who take action when there is a safety concern even though such action costs the company time and money. 172 Of course, some decisions will have shorter timelines than others, and a full-blown peerreviewed risk analysis is not always practicable. But even where decisions need to be made in relatively short order, there must be systems in place to ensure that some sort of formal risk analysis takes place when procedures are changed, and that the analysis considers the impact of the decision in the context of all system risks.…”

An Analysis of the Media’s Role in the 2008 Economic Recession

“…As such, finance journalists could be viewed as key actors in shaping public opinion. Parsons (1989) has done seminal work documenting how the media's role has evolved since the early 17 th century all the way to the 1930s in Europe as well as the United States (Suttles & Jacobs, 2010). To fully understand the role of the media during the recession it is important to contextualize it within history.…”

Time and the Political Economy of Financial Television

“…Financial journalists were once marginalized in news organizations (Simons, 1999). During the Great Depression, there was no news about finance and economics, only news about business and commerce (Suttles, 2010). The expansion of finance capital in the 1980s raised the status of financial journalists from the second class to the first.…”

“…American press coverage in the 1920s and the 1980s packaged economic ideology as stories that are immediately recognizable and convincing. In both eras, the economy was seen as a self-functioning machine as well as a work of nature with seasonal cycle (Suttles, 2010). Advertising and marketing of financial products reinforce the "ownership society" ideology, in which individuals are asked to be responsible for their financial security (Greenfield & Williams, 2001).…”