Tweeting for liberty (and cold hard cash)

Tweeting For Liberty (and cold hard cash)

by digby

Remember that bizarro Lindsay Lohan tweet about the horrors of inflation? Well, it turns out it’s the brainschild of a future Galtian overlord. Annie Lowrey reports:

The National Inflation Association is a limited liability company, a private, for-profit business. It is the brainchild of professional stock hawkers, one of whom happens to be the youngest-ever person charged by the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is devoted to educating Americans about our perilous monetary policy. But it is also devoted to recommending investments—including penny stocks—supposedly able to hold value in the supposedly imminent hyperinflationary period.
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Its president is Gerard Adams, a young libertarian and the head of Wall Street Grand, “the Number One investor relations and investor awareness consulting company today.” What is “awareness consulting,” you ask? Merely advertising. Publicly traded companies, generally ones with penny stocks, pay Wall Street Grand fees to promote them in videos, on its site, and in newsletters. The company also runs a “penny stock investor membership club” and offers up stocks as “investment opportunities” on its site.
[…]
The NIA’s other guiding light has a longer, more checkered history as a promoter of penny stocks. Jonathan Lebed, also 26, has the distinction of being the youngest-ever person and first-ever minor charged with running a so-called “pump and dump” scheme by the SEC. Armed with nothing more than a few email addresses, an E-Trade account, and understanding parents, Lebed started buying penny stocks, hyping them on Internet forums, and then selling high. In 2000, when he was 15, he paid a $285,000 fine to the SEC without admitting any wrongdoing.

In a long profile by Michael Lewis in the New York Times Magazine, Lebed evinced little shame. If Wall Street analysts and cable-TV commentators and everyone else were making money talking their books, why shouldn’t he? “Whether it is analysts, brokers, advisors, Internet traders, or the companies, everybody is manipulating the market,” he told Lewis. “If it wasn’t for everybody manipulating the market, there wouldn’t be a stock market at all.”

That’s another of those “producers” we keep hearing about. Addin’ value. Makin’ this country great.

Who says the American Dream is dead?

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