#076 Herb Greenberg On The 'Golden Era' Of Business Journalism

Herb Greenberg (@HerbGreenberg) is the editor of the Empire Financial Daily e-letter, Herb Greenberg's QUANT-X System, and Empire Real Wealth.

Previously, he was the co-founder of Pacific Square Research and Greenberg Meritz Research & Analytics – both independent, short-biased investment research firms.

Greenberg spent more than 40 years as a financial journalist at some of the country's leading newspapers, websites, and broadcast media, where he covered almost every industry.

He served as senior stocks commentator at CNBC and was a financial correspondent at the Chicago Tribune. He also spent 10 years as the daily business columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, during which time he started his five-year run as Fortune's monthly Against the Grain columnist and was the morning business reporter for San Francisco's KRON-TV.

When the Internet and online media were still emerging, Greenberg was one of the first mainstream journalists to make the shift online, when he became senior columnist at TheStreet. He later shifted to the same role at MarketWatch. When Dow Jones bought out MarketWatch, he added a weekend investor column for the Wall Street Journal to the mix.

Earlier in his career, Greenberg was a reporter at Crain's Chicago Business and a business reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. He also spent a year as an analyst at a risk arbitrage firm.

Greenberg holds a bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Miami and completed the Herbert J. Davenport Fellowship at the University of Missouri.

0:00 Show Open

1:54 Welcome Herb Greenberg

2:40 Wanted to be a radio disc jockey, turned out to be a business journalist

4:06 Getting hooked on reporting 

5:40 Path to the University of Miami 

6:00 Late bloomer in journalism career 

9:00 From Miami to St. Paul

10:25 Herb’s big break at Crain’s (the “bootcamp” of his career)

14:00 ‘Golden era’ of business journalism 

15:08 Herb wrote the ‘original Business Insider’ column

18:08 The story Herb never talks about 

22:00 State of business journalism today 

24:44 Stories 

27:14 Assessment of the markets and the economy 

28:44 Paying the price for ridiculously low rates 

30:00 Discrepancy between what’s real and the data 

31:16 Markets are messy 

32:55 Wish I had been more aggressive in funding 401k and IRA

34:55 Best question anyone has ever asked me 

37:57 Family office analysts are happier than hedge fund analysts 

42:00 Red flags 

46:00 Silicon Valley Bank, regional bank failures

49:00 The ETF Monster https://www.cnbc.com/2010/09/13/man-vs-machine-the-etf-monster.html

51:30 Blaming the short-seller narrative 

53:10 Concept of avoiding loss

53:50 ChatGPT is the ‘new weather’ on earnings calls

58:00 Longevity