To print our poems, the propulsive cause, Is fame; the breath of popular applause.
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)
Thanks to reader GMR for the headsup on this.
Well blow me down and call me Ethel, this humble corner of cyberspace has made Vanity Fair! Check out this article on that dude Allen Stanford (it's really quite good indeed), but here below is the excerpt that has the author Bryan Burrough mistakenly calling IKN "popular" (but why he thinks it's snarky round here is beyond me......). I'm glad to say that Alex Dalmady get far more mention (cos he's the guy that really deserves the laurels, in the end). Anyway, here's the text:
"...Dalmady found himself returning to the Stanford Web site. In the interim, the Madoff scandal had hit, and his curiosity soon turned to suspicion. “It became obvious,” Dalmady wrote. “No one was looking at stuff like this. The S.E.C. had its head up its butt. So I dug deeper and put some numbers on a spreadsheet—took me about 30 minutes. It just got worse. Where was the portfolio? What were they invested in? [Twenty percent plus] returns on their hedge funds? No way. Outperforming the S&P in stocks? No way. With 30 percent deposit growth [i.e., money constantly coming in]? No way.”"Stanford Financial, Dalmady judged, had to be a fraud. He decided to write up his conclusions in an article and offered it to an old friend who edited a Venezuelan financial magazine called Veneconomy, which published it at the end of January. At first, the piece caused little stir. Titled “Duck Tales,” it was front-loaded with complex financial analysis; Stanford Financial wasn’t even mentioned until page 4. But on February 9, a financial blog called the Devil’s Excrement republished it, at which point it was picked up by a popular Latin-American blog, the snarky Inca Kola News. The Inca Kola item, in turn, immediately became the focus of intense interest.
“So far today,” a post on the blog read, “this humble blog has had several visits from major newswires, three visits from the US Federal Reserve and one from the SEC, all using [the terms] ‘Alex Dalmady,’ ‘Stanford,’ ‘Madoff’ etc as keyword entries. Not to mention all those people from an island called Antigua and plenty from a company called ‘Stanford Eagle’ in Houston. Hi guys, having a nice day?”
UPDATE: Regular reader 'Ward' wins with this comment left below:
Now that IKN has made it into mainstream media I'm expecting to see posts such as:
- Peru on track to meet GDP growth projections
- South America needs US economic stimulus
- Evo suspected of inciting separationist movement in Texas