Spin and slant are hardly unknown in newspapers, but the front page of Wednesdays Sun subjected the truth to such aggressive editing as to give a completely upside-down impression of what was going on in financial markets.
A day after the newspapers front page editorial, beseeching voters to BeLEAVE in Britain, the tabloid put together a bizarre pastiche involving Remains dwindling poll lead, nasty Euro moths and what a large sub-headline described as a Brexit Rocket Boost to Shares. What makes this last item the stand-out in this bizarre brew is that the big financial story overnight had been the £30bn wiped off the FTSE on Tuesday, which was widely thought to be associated with the surging position of the leave camp in the latest polls.
The rocket-boost claim was repeated and attributed to analysis in the text of the story on the front page, but only readers who pressed on to the bottom of the second column of the story on the second page got any indication of what this claim was based on, a Deutsche Bank research note which observed that European shares were set to tank by around 10% in the event of Britain voting leave, but also suggested that the slide in UK shares could be somewhat smaller, leading to a relative over-performance of around 5%.
The rocket booster then turns out to be not an increase, but a smaller decline than that witnessed elsewhere. And even that is a highly speculative suggestion. To highlight this figure after a trading session when the the London markets had been in freefall is a little bit like splashing on somebody predicting that Manchester United might win the league next year, the evening after they had suffered a five-nil defeat. The basis for Deutsche Banks prediction, by the way, was that Brexit would trigger such a run on the pound that UK exports would get cheaper, making them easier to sell.
