When an analyst’s views on a subject are valued for reflecting first-hand knowledge, that usually means one of two things:  The analyst was able to cause or somehow significantly affect that subject, or the analyst’s personal experiences from the subject’s effects were broadly representative.  

Which means that The New York Times op-ed staff whiffed on both counts when it ran former Chase Manhattan Bank Chairman David Rockefeller’s recent warning that President Obama’s supposedly protectionist trade policies could trigger global economic disaster just as the Hawley-Smoot tariff worsened the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Yes, as Rockefeller proclaims, he “lived through” the Depression – but only in the way that, say, Shirley Temple did.  He was all of 14 when the stock market crashed in 1929.  And as the grandson of mega-tycoon John D. Rockefeller, his experiences were about as typical as the child star’s.  We at GLOBALIZATION FOLLIES can even call “strike three” on The Times.  For the main Rockefeller family business then – oil – faced no significant import competition.

Rockefeller’s piece might still have had some substantive justification had it added meaningfully to the trade policy debate.  But he simply parroted by-now familiar alarms about the potentially disastrous effects of U.S. mini-moves like Buy American stimulus requirements and tire tariffs.

Of course, the grand irony surrounding such economic conventional wisdom and its still  hypnotic hold on Big Media is how utterly wrong and increasingly dangerous it is.  After all, nothing is likelier to turn this economic crisis into a 1930s rerun than Rockefeller-type urgings to preserve a trade status quo whose built-in imbalances made the global economy so dangerously lopsided and crisis-prone to begin with.

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