Bronze-level articleZero Hedge

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Zero Hedge[1] is a popular batshit insane finance blog run by an anonymous founder who posts articles under the name "Tyler Durden," after Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club antagonist personality. Tyler claims to be a "believer in a sweeping conspiracy that casts the alumni of Goldman Sachs as a powerful cabal at the helm of U.S. policy, with the Treasury and the Federal Reserve colluding to preserve the status quo." His solution actually mirrors the anatagonist in Fight Club in that Tyler wants, per Austrian school ideas, to lead a catastrophic market crash in order to destroy banking institutions and bring back "real" free market capitalism.[2]

The site posts nearly indecipherable analyses of multiple seemingly unrelated subjects to point towards a consistent theme of economic collapse any day now. Tyler seems to repeat The Economic Collapse Blog's idea of posting blog articles many times a day and encouraging people to post it as far and wide as humanly possible. Tyler moves away from the format of long lists to write insanely dense volumes[3][4] filled with often contradicting jargon that makes one wonder if the writers even know what the words actually mean.[5]

The only writer very conclusively identified is Dan Ivandjiiski, who conducts public interviews on behalf of Zero Hedge.

Zero Hedge is not quite the NaturalNews of economics, but not for want of trying.

Contents

[edit] Actually doing some good

Zero Hedge came to public notoriety when it brought to light the number of high frequency computer trades (flash trades) conducted by Goldman Sachs in Tyler's more condensed and coherent analyses. Goldman Sachs used this data as a form of arbitrage to make a profit off penny differences in bid/ask prices. This was picked up by Bloomberg News for a piece called Goldman Sachs Loses Grip on Its Doomsday Machine by Jonathan Weil.[6] This caused the SEC to change weekly financial reporting, and propose to ban flash trading all together.

With Zero Hedge receiving more attention from the mainstream media, Tyler started to inject his more insane theories into interviews with front man Dan Ivandjiiski. Matt Taibbi decided to interview and publish the resulting story about Goldman Sachs in Rolling Stone.[7][8] There he states that Goldman is controlling and manipulating everything in order to make money for their cabal of rich people.

"From tech stocks to high gas prices, Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression -- and they're about to do it again." - The Great American Bubble Machine - Matt Taibbi (emphasis added)

Zero Hedge later earned what started as a severe mocking by CNBC analyst Dennis Kneale,[9][10] and turned into a mocking rant by Dennis Kneale "calling top indie finance blogs such as Zero Hedge a bunch of idiots who live in their mothers’ basements" when Zero Hedge refused to show up. Zero Hedge championed it as an absolute victory, including a temporary drop in CNBC's viewer-ship[11] and forcing Kneale out of CNBC Kneale accepting a better position at Fox Business.[12]

[edit] Accusations of plagiarism

Tyler has a habit of taking other people's research, sometimes adding a slant to it of economic doom if it isn't there already, and posting it on Zero Hedge.[13] This included a series of reports leaked from Merrill Lynch's chief economist David Rosenberg.[14] Lawyers were sent with take down notices, and were not moved by his claims of censorship about publishing their copyrighted documents. Morgan Stanley had the same issue later, and is considering legal action in addition to demanding the material be taken down.[15]

[edit] Possible identity

Tyler Durden and Zero Hedge have been postulated to be the sole work of Dan Ivandjiiski.[16] This is due to him being the only writer taking the identity during public interviews, such as Bloomberg News radio interviews, and due to the blog coming online several days after he lost his job at Wexford Capital, a Connecticut-based hedge fund run by a former Goldman trader.

Dan Ivandjiiski's history is a little odd, since he moved to America from Bulgaria to study at the University of Pennsylvania in order to pursue molecular biology (then go on to med school). Instead he took a job as a junior investment banker at Jefferies & Company in Los Angeles, and continued in finance. It is interesting to note that in 2005, while working for Miller Buckfire, he was barred from working in the broker-dealer business due to insider trading amounting to $780.

Dan denies that he founded the site, but he claims no other profession and to be the primary author of a number of the articles. He claims he writes with a staff of up to 40 other writers that work for Zero Hedge. However, secrecy is paramount in case "They" find out.

Creative journalism is apparently not out of place in the Ivandjiiski family either. His father Krassimir Ivandjiiski runs a cranky tabloid called Bulgaria Confidential. It received brief recognition in the US after publishing a story about massive drug trafficking and corruption in Montana, picked up by an independent US rag Free Speech Newspaper.[17] There Krassimir and Free Speech claimed that the governor was an alcoholic drug abuser that helped turn his state into one of the pits of drug trafficking in the US.[18] The governor fired off complaints about slander, while many people wondered why a state hundreds of miles from any major population center and one small highway[19] could have more drug runners than the West Coast.[20]

[edit] See also

[edit] Footnotes

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