Work & Finance

Ben Stein explains how business news became the new Victoria’s Secret catalog…and what you can learn from the sirens of stock TV.

Money Honey Rule 4
The boring but powerful truth is that the way for you, a regular guy, to make money is by consistently buying index funds here and abroad in good times and bad, month in and month out.
That’s a fact. But it’s not really news. It doesn’t merit 24-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week TV coverage. Having a stunner tell you the latest gossip—totally ­meaningless for the investment future of 99 percent of us—that’s showbiz. The old saw from Hollywood used to be that drama is “boy gets cute dog, cute dog gets stolen, boy gets cute dog back.” Now, on TV news, the drama is the girl with the kissable lips telling you rumors about interest-rate moves that have zero to do with your long-run future.

Money Honey Rule 5
Finally, and perhaps most subtle, as was explained to me by a friend in sales: When immense sums of money are being talked about, men want to see women.
More vital to the advertising-sales people at CNN, Fox, and CNBC, when men see beautiful women, they think about buying things. They think about buying expensive things such as luxury cars and European travel. I know I’ll get a lot of mail about this, but there’s a reason Madison Avenue uses beautiful women to sell things. We are hard­wired to listen more carefully to and pay more attention to and spend more money on beautiful women. That’s just who we are as human beings.

Now, I know I’ll also get some mail about this, so I’ll just foreclose it right now: Watching money shows is largely a men’s game. Men watch CNBC and the other business outlets more than women do. Someday it may change, and then maybe a magazine like Cosmopolitan will ask me to write a piece about money hunks. But for now, it’s us pig men watching the money shows, in general, and we want to see women.

Well, now you know. And I’ll tell you what: For those of us who spend a lot of our lives appearing on these shows, it’s not a bad thing. For the rest of you out there watching, count yourselves lucky that Rupert Murdoch and the rest of the guys running TV figured this out.