Bigot Revels in His Three Seconds of 'Fame'

Bigot Hal Turner was still bloviating today about his phony web report on banks supposedly turning up as insolvent in the stress test, which may have contributed to the sharp market decline yesterday.

Turner claims the SEC contacted him, but that would only be a fruitful avenue of investigation if Turner personally profited. He claims that "neither the Turner Radio Network nor myself profited by the movement of the markets in any way whatsoever."

I tend to believe that. It was clearly a publicity stunt, and a brilliant one at that. Now everyone (including me, obviously) is talking about a low-rent clown who most of us have never heard about before. If his name didn't resemble Ted Turner's (no relation), he may not have gotten so much mileage.

It shows how fragile the markets are that anyone can just make stuff up, put it on the Internet, and stand by and giggle while watching the market tank. Even though a Googling of this Turner character would show that he just makes stuff up and throws it on the Internet (the ADL website made that very clear), for some reason he was taken seriously.

It had all the hallmarks of a crude hoax. As Chris Whalen of Institutional Risk Analytics pointed out in an email to clients this morning, the Turner report contained a "tell" that is was a phony--the inclusion of HSBC among the list of sixteen supposedly insolvent banks: