If you're wondering why Zuckerberg's hookup site is currently crashing in the market, you haven't been paying attention since 2008. This is short selling, a common Wall Street practice in which X Bank buys a whole bunch of shares on day one, sells 'em on day two, and buys 'em back by day five once the price has bottomed out. Just one of the many ways fortunes are made these days without producing anything of value.
And it's totally legal. Naked short selling may be fraud, but nakedly shorting a new stock is perfectly acceptable. Sure, the massive amount of shares a bank can move in one go thanks to high-frequency trading software could very well trigger the price drop currently being witnessed but that's all circumstantial, as the lawyers like to say.
Some hack at Forbes is trying to blame this on the Big Bad Gub'mint. Forbes seems to find it's writers at World Net Daily because this again isn't anything illegal. It's just good ol' finance capitalism, doing what it does best.
Which is mostly nothing but still getting paid for it.
Update: Booyah! I scooped the Wall Street Journal!
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