Although the author of this article has got the housing bubble right in my opinion, he’s not really ‘the media’. He is (or was) in fact, one of the main cheerleaders of the dot-com bubble:
Blodget received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University and began his career as a freelance journalist and was a proofreader for Harper’s Magazine. In 1994, Blodget joined the corporate finance training program at Prudential Securities, and, two years later, moved to Oppenheimer & Co. in equity research. In October 1998 [1], he predicted that Amazon.com’s stock price would hit $400 (which it did a month later, gaining 128%). This call received significant media attention, and, two months later, he accepted a prized position at Merrill Lynch.[2][3] Blodget’s influence continued to increase, and, in 2000, he was voted the No. 1 Internet/eCommerce analyst on Wall Street by Institutional Investor, Greenwich Associates, and thestreet.com. In early 2000, days before the dot-com bubble burst, Blodget personally invested $700,000 in tech stocks, only to lose most of it in the years that followed.[4] In 2001, he accepted a buyout offer from Merrill Lynch and left the firm.
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.[5] In 2003, he was charged with civil securities fraud by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.[6] He settled without admitting or denying the allegations and was subsequently banned from the securities industry for life. He paid a $2 million fine and $2 million disgorgement.[7]
