Since then, Zero Hedge has provided little clarity about who is now using the pen name. Soon after that interview, Lokey disappeared from the internet. In 2016 ex-employee Colin Lokey revealed to Bloomberg that he and two others had been publishing under the name. Yet it’s unclear who, exactly, is using Durden as a nom de plume. But for Zero Hedge this tone is nothing new. gloomy: A pandemic, massive market volatility, severe weather systems, police brutality, shootings, and an impending presidential election have dominated the news cycle. “Rickards: The Layoffs Are Just Beginning.” “‘We Are Headed For The Worst Of The Worst’ Week For Markets” Oft described as a permabear, the site regularly heralds a doom-and-gloom narrative. This, in and of itself, encapsulates the Zero Hedge viewpoint. The company’s tagline is a quote from Fight Club: “On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.” The character’s iconography is the focus of Zero Hedge’s branding strategy: An image of a shirtless Brad Pitt, who stars as Durden in the 1999 movie, serves as an avatar on Twitter and Zero Hedge’s site. Zero Hedge now publishes dozens of articles each day, ranging from financial analysis to, increasingly, conspiracy theories, most of which are authored by “Tyler Durden.”ĭurden is the fictional, nihilistic protagonist of the film Fight Club, which revolves around a man’s journey from white-collar worker to leader of an underground group of men who brawl for entertainment. Google Trends, which tracks web search analytics, shows that searches peaked earlier this year when Twitter banned the site’s account for harassing a scientist who may have had information about the spread of the coronavirus, Buzzfeed reported at the time. Since then, Zero Hedge’s readership has skyrocketed. Soon after, Senator Chuck Schumer called on the Securities and Exchange Commission to investigate high-frequency trading. In July of that year, an ex–Goldman Sachs computer programmer had been arrested for stealing computer code from the company. Avenue.”īut Zero Hedge swiftly gained traction, beginning with a series of stories on Goldman Sachs claiming that the bank had used high-frequency trading to profit through the New York Stock Exchange, 2009 reporting by New York Magazine shows. “Wall Street's diarrhea shi(f)ting to Park Street er. The site’s first post, published on January 9, 2009, and still visible online today, set the tone for a decade to come: In other words, the kindling for a renegade blog like Zero Hedge was piled high. Meanwhile, online news readership eclipsed newspapers for the first time, according to a late-2008 study from the Pew Research Center. They did, of course: Roush rightly points out that there were dozens of stories that warned investors and consumers that there was a housing bubble ready to burst. “A lot of people were saying that places like The Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times should have warned investors and consumers that we were heading toward the recession and that there was a real estate bubble.” “There was, during that time, a distrust of traditional financial media,” says Chris Roush, a journalism professor and the blogger behind Talking Biz News. The public felt like bungled calls were par for the course in financial news. Skepticism about traditional financial media was brewing. But days earlier, CNBC host Jim Cramer had recommended that the public buy the stock. Stocks and bonds started to tank.Īfter 84 years in operation, investment bank Bear Stearns nearly collapsed.
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