Iain Dale: Idiot NOT Liar in Misrepresenting Wall Street Journal?

Reading Iain Dale's headline Wall Street Journal Says Brown's Bailout Measures Have Failed and then following his advice and reading the WSJ article in full is instructive.

But please do not rush to dub the Labour Party's Favourite Tory Boy Blogger "LIAR", rather it's a case of "IDIOT", again.

When it comes to economics and finance Iain is just not equipped to comment with any authority. We know that. But it also seems he is too pissed off with BT* to even read the piece, written by Sara Schaefer Munoz with a once over from Alistair MacDonald, with any care. I'm not that sure of the piece's authority. SSM has the odd byline on banking and economy stories but her general oeuvre has been as a juggling and de-cluttering diary blogger, and a general featurist. MacDonald - who is a dyed in the wool suited and booted city type - has perhaps got a by-line here for a "rescue" effort?

It's horses for courses. And it looks like Iain is a faller at the first.

If Iain had read carefully he'd have found that - rather than having failure at its heart, and under the headline "Some Find U.K. Bailout Too Onerous" - the WSJ includes the word "successful" not once but twice, and the word "fail" not at all.

Some of the non-central little bits round the edges of the world-beating Brown-Darling rescue have been judged by still greedy bankers to be insufficiently generous. Which is NOT necessarily bad news, now is it?

Here are the three paragraphs (verbatim ... including that ellipsis) that immediately follow the five that city slicker (not) Iain Dale has quoted:

"On the whole, the measures have been successful in stabilizing the system," said Julian Franks, a professor of finance at London Business School. But "they may not have got the pricing right....The government is obviously worried about selling these guarantees too cheaply."

The troubles in the U.K. are similar to those in the U.S., where several programs struggled at first. One, the Public-Private Investment Program, designed to get toxic assets off bank balance sheets, will likely be much smaller than originally planned.

To be sure, the major programs the U.K. government has put in place to combat the financial crises are widely seen as successful. That includes the government's flagship move: its £37 billion ($60 billion) infusion of cash directly into three of the country's largest banks last October. A £250 billion debt guarantee for banks has also been widely used and credited with helping stem the confidence crisis last fall.

FOOTNOTES: Iain's also still moaning as if Digby Jones and Greg Dyke are Labourites. What does he know about? * If anyone from BT would like to get in touch and show us how Iain's organisation rather than themselves messed up, as readers of Iain Dale's Porkies probably suspect, that would be illuminating.