Equities analyst Barry Ritholtz wasn’t buying Facebook or its initial public offering. In a May 22 blog post, he described Mark Zuckerberg as an arrogant, 28-year-old man-child and said that the social network “went public more or less unlawfully over the past two years, allowing 1000s (or more) of outside investors to acquire substantial stakes […]

Read more

“Any investor who can get shares of the Facebook IPO should purchase as many shares as possible.” That was Jim Cramer’s tout on his CNBC Mad Money program, which promises viewers “an in-depth look at Wall Street, stock, and the market.” It is Cramer’s good fortune that he is not legally responsible for the bullshit he […]

Read more

…of incomes that Americans had long taken for granted as a happy fact of modern life was reversing itself.” Nearly 30 years after this trend began, income inequality in America was as large as at any point since the Great Crash of 1929, with the wealthiest 1 percent controlling nearly a quarter of the country’s […]

Read more

There has been little media coverage of the tension between the Occupy Wall Street movement and the progressive institutions—such as MoveOn.org, the AFL-CIO, the United Auto Workers, SEIU, and Rebuild the Dream—that are working together as 99% Spring. Adbusters, the Vancouver-based anti-corporate collective that incited the September 2011 Occupy protest, warns that the movement is being […]

Read more

First, an attempt to define the odd bubble in which CPAC exists. I am sitting in the press gallery listening to Iowa Congressman Steve King tell a crowd of 3,500 that he orders his interns to replace the energy-efficient light bulbs in his Capitol office with “black-market Edison light bulbs.” “The janitors, Nancy’s [Pelosi] Stasi […]

Read more