I've been reading Linda McQuaig's "Shooting the Hippo", about Canada's "deficit scare" of the early 1990's. There was a Canadian equivalent of Stossell at the time, Eric Malling, whose show "W5" had a program about a short-term currency crisis in New Zealand, presented as a deficit crisis with implications for Canada. McQuaig writes: "To illustrate the concept of the debt wall in Canadian terms, Malling presents us with an image of Canada's deputy finance minister walking in to a cabinet meeting and declaring that Canada's credit has run out. Malling only tells us that this is what 'economists are predicting.' Over lunch, however, Malling volunteers that the image in fact came from Howe president Tom Kierans..." She describes the C.D. Howe Institute as a "prominent Toronto think tank funded by Bay Street."
So the question is - Does Stossell get fed ideas from right-wing think tanks in the US, and would it be easier to dismiss him if he did?
There is also a new book by McQuaig, published earlier this year, called "The Cult of Impotence: Selling the Myth of Powerlessness in the Global Economy."