Maria Bartiromo spent over a decade at Fox News explaining why the stock market going up was bad and why the stock market going down was also bad. Now she's gone. Fox gave no reason. That's the entire story.
She interviewed presidents. She broke news about investigations. She asked hard-hitting questions like "isn't inflation terrible" to people who already thought inflation was terrible. Tens of thousands of retirees adjusted their portfolios based on whatever she said that morning. Those portfolios are now worth less than they were when she started.
The financial media ecosystem works like this: someone appears on television, says words about the economy, and then retail traders lose money in ways that have nothing to do with those words. Bartiromo mastered this format. She could turn a jobs report into must-see television for people who don't understand jobs reports. She made the Fed sound exciting to people who will never read a Fed statement.
Fox announced her departure Thursday with the enthusiasm of a company burying a quarterly loss in a footnote. No farewell tour. No tribute reel. Just gone.
Her absence will be filled by another person who will sit in a different chair and say different words that will also be completely irrelevant to whether your stocks go up or down. The graphics will look the same. The breaking news alerts will have the same urgency. Your uncle will still text you about buying gold.
Somewhere right now a day trader is wondering if this affects his Tesla position. It doesn't. Nothing she ever said affected his Tesla position either, but at least back then he had someone to blame.
Photo by 🇻🇪 Jose G. Ortega Castro 🇲🇽 on Unsplash
Leave a Comment