What the Facebook Fiasco Tells Us About Our Rigged Stock Market

How long will we keep getting Zuckered?

By Lynn Parramore

May 24, 2012  |  In the wake of the JP Morgan blow-up and the Facebook debacle, Americans are contemplating the stock market with a mixture of alarm and disgust. Both are justified. In world of high-speed trading and other manipulations, the ordinary investor who wants to make money over the long haul can easily get screwed by those playing a short-term game.

On May 18, Facebook went public to relentless mainstream media cheers. As of Thursday, May 24, the stock was down 15 percent of the initial offering of $38 per share. The Internet bubble of 1998-2000 gave us a brutal lesson in what happens when investors shell out gigantic sums for unproven companies. But never mind. Those “rational” creatures neoliberal economists are always going on about -- you know, the kind that operate on “perfect information” -- did what actual humans tend to do. They got overly excited, followed the herd and found out that their information was far from perfect.