Launch to 2014 In August 2009, under the pseudonym Tyler Durden, Ivandjiiski was interviewed on
Bloomberg Radio on
HFT. Following a series of pieces accusing Goldman Sachs of using high-frequency trading to profit via the
New York Stock Exchange, Zero Hedge's readership grew rapidly. However, Justin Fox, also described Ivandjiiski as "a wonderfully persistent investigative reporter" and credited him for successfully turning
high-frequency trading "into a big political issue," but also termed most of the writing on the website as "half-baked hooey," albeit with some "truth to be gleaned from it." In January 2011, Zero Hedge was quoted in the
Columbia Journalism Review regarding a JPMorgan-Ambac lawsuit: "JPM committed fraud through misrepresentation, then wilfully and maliciously traded against the entities it had sold misrepresented securities to." In March 2011,
Time magazine ranked Zero Hedge as 9th, in its
25 Best Financial Blogs, with nominator, Paul Kedrosky of
Bloomberg News stating that "So while I don't read Zero Hedge regularly—it's too bearish, too conspiratorial and too much of an intellectual monoculture—I like knowing that it exists. Any time I'm feeling like things might just turn out O.K. on planet Economic Earth, I know where to turn to be disabused of that stupid idea."
Susanne Craig of
The New York Times described Zero Hedge in October 2011 as "a well-read and controversial financial blog." In December 2012,
Bank of America, which had been criticized by the site in the past, blocked its employees' access to Zero Hedge from BOA servers. In November 2014, Craig Pirrong, Professor of Finance at the
University of Houston, stated: "I have frequently written that Zero Hedge has the
MO of a
Soviet agitprop operation, that it reliably peddles
Russian propaganda: my first post on this, almost exactly three years ago, noted the parallels between Zero Hedge and
Russia Today." In September 2015, economist
Paul Krugman described Zero Hedge as a scaremongering outlet that promotes fears of
hyperinflation and an "obviously ridiculous" form of "
monetary permahawkery." In November 2012, Krugman had noted that Bill McBride of
Calculated Risk, an economics blog, has treated Zero Hedge with "appropriate contempt". Krugman has been the subject of hundreds of articles on the website (almost all negative). In April 2016, as part of its expose from the Colin Lokey interview, "Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge, Wall Street's Renegade Blog",
Bloomberg Markets stated that since its founding in the middle of the
2008 financial crisis, "Zero Hedge has grown from a blog to an Internet powerhouse. Often distrustful of the 'establishment' and almost always
bearish, it's known for a pessimistic worldview. Posts entitled 'Stocks Are in a Far More Precarious State Than Was Ever Truly Believed Possible' and 'America's Entitled (And Doomed) Upper Middle Class' are not uncommon."
Post–2018 On 20 November 2019,
NBC News reported Zero Hedge as the initial source of a "misleading claim about the head of the Ukrainian energy company at the heart of the House impeachment inquiry", which went viral during the
impeachment hearings. NBC said that "ZeroHedge apparently misconstrued the original Russian article from the Interfax-Ukraine News Agency, which did not mention an indictment. The Interfax-Ukraine News Agency operates as part of Interfax, a Russian news outlet". In January 2020, after Zero Hedge had been
removed from Twitter,
The Washington Post said that, "Zero Hedge launched in 2009, mostly featuring news and commentary about financial markets from a
libertarian perspective. In recent years, the blog has amplified right-wing conspiracy theories on a range of topics." ==Litigation==