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Good. Now we are getting somewhere. I too would love it if OP (or I guess in this case OC) elaborated on these points.

EDIT: Ok I see we are both editing the temper down some ;) I will refrain from my other comments, which were rather unhelpful.

Well the writing is somewhat turgid in its use of nominalizations and the passive voice but that really doesn't mean its saying nothing. It just makes it a bit harder to read.

Perhaps to someone sufficiently well versed in the field and its recent history, including who said what and when, the innuendo could be clearly read. I'd venture to guess that most readers could not; I certainly couldn't.

When I read martythemaniak's comment with its talk of "some people", "the mainstream camp" and "high profile economists" it's unclear who these groups are.

Monetarists? Keynesians? Advocates of lower government spending? Advocates of tax increases to cut government debt? Or tax cuts to spur growth? Advocates of higher government spending? Spending on bailouts? Countercyclical government spending on infrastructure projects? Academic economists at universities, who don't put their money where their mouth is? Big city financiers, who got us into this mess? Government economist-politicians, who have to be perpetually upbeat to try to keep the market confident? 'The Stock Market' which isn't even a person? Bloggers and columnists? Advocates of lower interest rates? Higher interest rates? Republicans? Democrats?

Needless to say, as I didn't know who was being talked about I couldn't derive much meaning from martythemaniak's comment.

I don't disagree with you, it is a sloppy way to write, but quite common when the writer has a lot of emotion and not a lot of patience to go cite the specific conversations.

So lets take one example and work through it, martythemaniak's wrote:

"At the onset of the 2008 crisis, some people very accurately predicted the type of crisis it was (a financial panic) and recommended policies that were tested and proven to work."

Using the search terms "Iceland Bank Reform" lead me to a whitepaper [1] from Mercatus which goes into great detail about the controversy around the decision to eliminate debt, it cites several economists and papers, both from the time period and the present looking back. A similar search for "Ireland banking crisis" leads to a similar set of papers where people discuss how to pull Ireland out of the mud.

So what does this say about Marty's writing style? and our reading of it? Well it says Marty throws out his emotional angst over this (perhaps he advocated the debt canceling path for Ireland, I don't know) with his comment that "some people" recommended things known to work, clearly at least a few of those people were advising the Icelandic government as they implemented those ideas. If we're engaged readers we do our own legwork, we can attach names to those people. It's more work for us, and perhaps less satisfying that way.

The comment was accused of not saying "anything" when in fact it did say things. What it did not do was to lay out evidence for the claims made, Further, the use of the passive voice made pulling out the information which would help the reader research the claims more difficult.

So there are at least three things going on here, one an emotional rant from someone who believed in strategies that Iceland implemented, but were widely criticized in other economies, feeling vindicated. Second, a quickly thrown together narrative about the tunnel vision which lead to this situation. And finally, a turgid writing style which imposes an unnecessary burden on the reader trying to understand the meaning or substance behind the rant.

[1] http://mercatus.org/publication/iceland-and-ireland-banking-...

There is a book, "Freefall: America, Free Markets, and the Sinking of the World Economy"(2010), by Joseph Stiglitz - an economist of Nobel prize fame and former Chief Economist of the World Bank, who very early saw the coming of the global crisis and was laughed at in 2005-2006 for his opinion, esp. at a then held Davos summit.

In his book he elaborates deeply - but accessibly for "laymen" - what went wrong, how it could be fixed, but against whose interests in US the ideal public policy solution would have been, and so why just a dubious set of half-measures were taken, by whom, and how it might all worsen as situation in the near future.

So far, for the period from 2010 to 2012, what he claims and predicts seems right and rings true to me.