Markets

Morgan Stanley's Censors Block Access to Top Financial Site

By David Weir

Updated on: March 19, 2009 / 12:50 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

"The truth shall set you free," the Bible informs us, but somebody better inform the censors over at Morgan Stanley, who are allegedly blocking some of the best content available online for dissecting the financial crisis-- The Baseline Scenario --from appearing on its corporate site.
Any website owner has the right to block any content, of course, so here are Morgan's official guidelines for the 23 types of content to be blocked:

Abused Drugs
Adult Material
Freeware and Software Download
Gambling
Hacking
Illegal or Questionable
Instant Messaging Internet Communication
Keyloggers
Malicious Web Sites
Military & Extremist
Peer-to-Peer File Sharing
Personal Network Storage and Backup
Personals and Dating
Phishing & Other Frauds
Proxy Avoidance
Racism & Hate
Social Networking and Personal Sites
Spyware
Tasteless
URL Translation Sites
Violence
Web Chat
Web-based Email

Now, in the comments thread following Baseline's post, at least one Morgan employee suggested that IT issues just might be to blame as opposed to human intervention. God knows, we all can identify with that type of problem. But, to date, it appears that Morgan Stanley has not officially confirmed or denied what is going on, so I thought the authors of the excellent Financial Crisis for Beginners deserved a bit of moral support in the form of this post.
Thanks once again to Erik Sherman, my Bnet colleague and most excellent tip-sender from the Eastern timezone!