re: #60 Killgore Trout

Ah, you might be right about the GE story, there have been updates since I last checked out the story…
WHO’S FULL OF CRAP? GE, The New York Times, And The Hazards Of “Tweeting The Record Straight” (see the updates for the amount of confusion involved.)

Well. I’m going to pull the old style way of debating. Here’s the author of the article you cite:

Henry Blodget (born 1966) is an American former equity research analyst, currently banned from the securities industry, who was senior Internet analyst for CIBC Oppenheimer during the dot-com bubble and the head of the global Internet research team at Merrill Lynch. Blodget is now the editor and CEO of The Business Insider, a business news and analysis site, and a host of Yahoo Daily Ticker, a finance show on Yahoo.

Fraud allegation and settlement

In 2002, then New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, published Merrill Lynch e-mails in which Blodget gave assessments about stocks which conflicted with what was publicly published. In 2003, he was charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He agreed to a permanent ban from the securities industry and paid a $2 million fine plus a $2 million disgorgement.