Thumbing its nose at Europe
Yesterday, the WSJ ran a column co-authored by Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy. I’m guessing that neither 10 Downing St. nor the Elysee was terribly glad to discover that the Journal buried their column at the bottom of a page, without even including one of those charming pencil portraits of either the French president or the British prime minister.
More importantly, the Journal also chose to run the Sarkozy-Brown column under the headline “Oil Prices Need Government Supervision,” which I found to be rather misleading. It sounds like Sarkozy and Brown are calling for a government takeover of yet another market. But here’s the closest they came to saying anything like that:
The Expert Group of the International Energy Forum should take the lead in establishing a common long-term view on what price range would be consistent with the fundamentals.These experts should also consider any measures that could be put in place to reduce volatility. And they should look again at whether trading activity is amplifying erratic price movements.
Pretty vague, huh? If the Journal wants to editorialize about energy policy in UK and France, it should publish an editorial, not hijack a column.
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