Nobody else is going to acknowledge it so we had better: the power of MacroBusiness.
It operates in the shadows. Almost always studiously ignored. But not powerless, far from it. It’s phantom form is, in fact, part of its influence. Happily pissing on the tent from the outside, we can say what others can only think, what others can only wish that they could say, what others would say if they were not prohibited from doing so by Australia’s captured media.
In recent weeks we’ve seen this power wielded to good effect. Nobody except MB called for the resignation of Sam Dastyari, called for Bob Carr and UTS to sunder their relationship with Yuhu Group, called for the resignation of Brian Wilson at the FIRB (apparently Terry McCrann did later).
Yet all of these things happened, as they should, in part because MB made them.
MB is well read in the corridors of power and its sting is real. There is the humiliation factor for one, also the emboldening factor as MB muscles out the space for the last few journalists in Australia to pursue truths against their owner’s interests.
MB can front run issues and keep them alive in the news cycle when they would otherwise die. We trigger all sorts of coverage of issues by providing novel angles and the authority of expert analysis that breaks through the myth-making fog that dominates the MSM.
Then there is the form of data journalism that we promote, forcing the MSM to lift its game, with no fewer than three mainstream MB copycats. It is easy to forget that before MB there were no charts used in Australian media. Now they are essential. Before MB, The Pascometer offered regular and terrible investment advice. Now he is silent (alas for the contrarian).
It is also debatable whether Australia would ever have seen macroprudential policy or that Labor would have adopted negative gearing reform without MB.
In other Western nations, social media is often blamed for the rise of the post-truth world. In Australian business media, MB is the only thing keeping truth alive.
MB works for the forces of good, yours and ours. We humbly ask that you subscribe to it.
