Early yesterday morning, the Wall Street Journal posted an editorial by Timo Soini, a Finish politician and Euro-skeptic who opposes the European central bank led effort to bail out Portugal. In the editorial, Soini criticizes the bank bailouts and weak willed politicians who support them. He writes:
“The official wisdom is that Greece, Ireland and Portugal have been hit by a liquidity crisis, so they needed a momentary infusion of capital, after which everything would return to normal. But this official version is a lie, one that takes the ordinary people of Europe for idiots. They deserve better from politics and their leaders…
The elite in Brussels will seek to enforce unanimity through pressure when it cannot be obtained by persuasion. Abolishing unanimity is only a matter of time. After that we have a full-fledged fiscal transfer union that is obviously in hock to Brussels’ anti-growth corporatism.”
This is what was written on the WSJ website yesterday, and was copied by several anti-central bank blogs and other websites. Finish newspapers also have the entire article available in full. but if you check now, you’ll see these and several other statements have been altered or removed all together. The article is still there, but much of its language critical of the banks are missing. There’s no doubt that just like in the United States in 2008, the central banks of Europe have a lot to gain from some kind of forced government bailout.
While the original article is no longer available on the WSJ website, we know it was originally posted as such because it was copied, pasted and linked on numerous news websites and blogs yesterday. To be fair, some of the alterations are cosmetic or simply an alteration of style. Some of the changes improve the readability of the piece in general, but the inflammatory rhetoric criticizing the banks has been removed as well.
This may be nothing, but it seems a highly questionable decision. Considering the Wall Street Journal’s past willingness to alter or flat out delete articles at the request of our own central bank, The Federal Reserve, when they were accused of having a conflict of interest worth millions in Goldman Sachs stock value, and you can understand my reluctance to accept this as an honest mistake. It’s also possible the author himself requested the changes, but that is really stretching it. It would be the first time I’ve ever heard of such an alteration being approved after publication, but then again, I’ve never heard of the WSJ white-washing an editorial before either.
Soini’s condemnation of politicians who claim there is not enough liquidity in the financial sector is stunningly similar to our own situation here in America, where the Federal Reserve recently printed $600 billion in economic stimulus to boost stock values and increase “lending liquidity” or in other words, push Americans to go further in debt.
This probably isn’t something worth getting your pitchfork ready for, but it’s definitely something to keep an eye on. If the author or the WSJ makes any comments on this story, I will update.
Enjoy the before and after edits here:
