Headlines have been found to contain large doses of highly caffeinated blowhardedness. The race to build “eyeballs”, the web’s one true currency for its easy conversion to ad dollars, and the elongated merge between print & digital media has developed a free-for-all in the headlines. Even the flagships (Times & Post grade) will borrow the wires’ habits.

The exaggeration of the headline has grown from situational to routine in this first full decade of digital media. The underlying information has become useless and migrated to panic-inducing copy about ghosts, goblins and dragons pouring from every crevice in search of fresh people to eat. Have the editors all been tied up with duct tape in the basement and the interns are now flying the plane? There is a real smell of no life’s experience governing headlines.

During the years long climb up to the cliff that housing would fall from, there was not a dissenting chirp uttered until the cliff began to give way in 2006. Print & digital media outlets did not run periodic stories, let alone a series, addressing the economically dangerous phenomenon of public use assets such as housing and food being used as trading dummies for profit and doing it with borrowed money (i.e. that such a strategy goes against a democratic government’s fundamental challenge of keeping public order – hard to accomplish when shelter and food are speculatively priced for profit).

The relationship between rates of growth in wages and the housing asset was not critically examined. Then the banks and housing speculators fell over the cliff and took the wider economy with them and we can’t shake loose from serial headlines shouting to run for your lives, Godzilla’s been spotted 50 miles out.

The canary in the coal mine wobbles and sings when the gas first leaks not after the explosion when the lives are buried under miles of rock. The coverage of Lehman and the latest leg down for banks (retail & investment) has been dreadful. The genuine failure of understanding around the build that led to their and their brethren’s troubles means the newsprint output at zero-hour lacks incisive analysis re: the necessary destruction of the players that piled on risk. A fundamental of the “free” in free market, if you want the thing to work sustainably.

Where’s the knowledge of editors, gained through experience and relationships, that prolonged issuance of debt (especially in a period of no wage growth), in a chain from Fed window, to regulated retail banker, dovetailing to unregulated investment banker, consumer, unregulated money manager (i.e. newbie hedge fund manager formerly trader at Goldman) and then piled into housing and commodities leads to a ferocious unwind? Where else could they have figured it would go …Eden?

A big rubber foot just whooshed past my office window and shards of a UPS truck are being scattered down the street.