BBC's Evan Davis says media could have warned of credit crunch

BBC's Evan Davis says media could have warned of credit crunch

The BBC's former economics editor Evan Davis said today journalists could have done more to warn the public about the credit crunch that triggered the current housing price crash and general financial turmoil.

Davis, now a presenter on BBC Radio 4's Today, said the media may have helped drive up the market by over-reporting statistics on rising house prices in run up to last summer's credit crunch crisis.

"I do ask whether we did our best to warn people of impending problems during the upswing of the [economic] cycle," Davis said at the Radio Festival in Glasgow today.

"My line is 'My God, we tried' but when everything is going well people don't want to hear it. We suffered from giving warnings a bit too early in the whole cycle.

"If, like me, you were saying in 2002/03, 'remember folks, house prices can go down as well as up', by 2005 that warning was beginning to lose a bit of credibility," he added.

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"We did warn them but didn't warn sufficiently loudly or clearly, and might have warned a little too early."

Davis, who was interviewed by his BBC colleague Jeremy Vine in Glasgow, said the media may also have helped inflate the market by reporting on every new house price survey – even when several of them were coming out in the same week.

"There was a period when online – not just online and not just the BBC – when house price stories were very interesting," he added.

"If you report the same thing five times then it sounds like they are going up even more. We in the end drive these things up just as the media did in the dotcom boom," Davis said.

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