Seeking Psychics: Consumers Look to Outside Help for Financial Advice

[onager]

Oh brother. Standard wide-eyed MSM goop about Those Amazin' Psychics and how they "help" people.

No stories about people who listened to these nutballs and lost all their money. (Like Robert Citron, the California bureaucrat whose advice from psychics and astrologers led to the biggest municipal bankruptcy in American history.)

There is one criticial note at the very end of the story, from the reality-based materialist grumps.

Virginia resident Pam Jenkins has been seeing New York psychic Carmen Harra since 2002, but with the economy in trouble, her inquiries have turned from trying to contact her deceased relatives toward questions about her financial future.

Facing possible foreclosure on her home, she asked her most trusted adviser, Harra, for some insight about the situation.

"I would take her advice over any financial planner and any lawyer any day," Jenkins said.

She said that her financial stress resulted from the fact that she'd got caught with a subprime loan after refinancing her home to add a pool...

"They are really helping to relieve anxiety," she said.

So does heroin, but I don't see any gullible reporters pushing that as an answer to financial problems.

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=7356014&page=1

[Warpy]

1. Fools and their money...

Seriously, though, some years ago when Louis Rukeyser on Wall Street Week was basically it for televised financial advice, some people got together and used the stock market page over a dart board and compared using darts to using his predictions. The dart board won.

Some of us with a good grasp of the obvious manage to figure out where the economy as a whole is headed. A very few people with a combination of that sort of intelligence plus extraordinary good luck manage to pick individual investments and do well. The majority of us, including the great experts with the advanced degrees, are completely befogged since publicly held corporations are not presenting all the facts in the yearly glossy prospectus.

The psychic probably isn't going to do a whole lot worse than the financial planner in picking stocks, in other words, because neither one of them has all the information necessary to make a rational choice.

However, when it comes to overall planning, that psychic is generally not going to do well, at all.

[progressoid]

2. The ironic thing is that a lot of people will see this as idiotic but then attend a prayer service

for the economy.

http://www.mmdnewswire.com/christian-business-4905.html
TOP CHRISTIAN BUSINESS LEADERS TO OFFER ECONOMIC STRATEGIES AT KINGDOM ECONOMIC YEARLY SUMMIT
"God is moving powerfully in the marketplace," said Cook, K.E.Y.S. organizer. "What's happening is both a market correction and a marketplace reformation," he added, "and the global financial turmoil and shaking of economies, nations, markets, institutions and currencies has helped trigger widespread fear and a crisis of belief in many people. In response, a growing number of business men and women are turning to God, discovering prayer and Biblical principles, choosing faith over fear, and re-examining their assumptions and beliefs about finances, investing, debt, retirement and stewardship in light of current economic conditions," he stated.

Or

http://www.tylerpaper.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20090417/RELIGION/904170326
lp us with economic pressure. There is pressures from all of the temptations of the evil one. God protect us and may we have family that we have families, that are testimonies of your presence,"said.



On the plus side, that ABC "reporter" did call it superstition.

[TZ]

3. ah yes...I remember seeing pictures of

fundies praying over a bull statue on Wall Street...And the stupid gits could not see the EXTREME irony that presented...

[progressoid]

6. Oh yeah! The idol worshipers!

I forgot about them.

[onager]

4. OK, help me out...

I couldn't find "superstition" in the article.

The name of one reporter tickled me, though...

By JUJU CHANG, THEA TRACHTENBERG and IMAEYEN IBANGA

JUJU Chang?

:rofl:

Any relation to the JuJu Hand of voodoo/witchcraft fame, I wonder?

You're right, people who would sneer at the psychics right along with us are probably...flocking to self-procaimed "Xian financial advisors." I hear their commercials frequently on the local Fundie FM radio station here in Los Angeles.

That's KKLA, which really needs one more "K" in its call-sign to fulfill the Truth-In-Advertising rules. Along with that Ol' Time Religion 24/7, listeners get a big serving of right-wing political talking points from the likes of James Dobson, Jay Sekulow, etc. etc.

Right now they're doing a lot of Obama-bashing, naturally. KKLA hasn't been this entertaining since the Clinton years.

[progressoid]

5. Watch the video (reading is hard)

At the beginning of the video Juju says, "One Ivy League business school professor who studies this dynamic says it's no wonder people turn to superstition when the future is so unpredictable, so uncertain. It gives you the illusion of control"


Sad that this is newsworthy. Of course, I use the term "news" loosely.

[onager]

7. Thanks! I didn't watch the vid.

Duh.

What annoyed me about this--at least in the written article: it was so one-sided. I'm sure, if they had looked, they could have found at least one person who listened to a psychic and LOST money.

But as written, all this "article" will do is drive more of the gullible into the claws of the charlatans.

OTOH...as much as I hate to admit it, I'm feeling less and less sympathy for the gullible these days. I feel a lot of sympathy for the collateral damage--the kids or other family members, like elderly parents, who might suffer because Mom or Dad blew the family savings on PsYkiK advice.

I'd like to think that getting burned once might help, but it never seems to. In Psychic World, failures never occur because the whole concept is a fraud and always has been. The suckers will just rationalize it by claiming they went to someone who "wasn't a real psychic," and keep looking until they find the next lucky one-hit phony. And the cycle starts all over again.

It reminds me of a favorite old saying about religion: "The only business in the world where the customer blames himself for a product failure."

I may go to that ABC site and post the Randi challenge. Not that it will do a damn bit of good.