Big Friend, Boohoo, Big Mess: How the Facebook IPO Symbolizes the False Hype of the Financial World

So I’m mildly amused by the debacle that was Facebook’s Wall Street debut, in that I always found the multi-billion dollar value of FB to be an illusion. Now that it’s dropped in value by over $20 billion, my suspicions are (slightly) confirmed. . . . But then again, it’s still worth many billions, so the drop in value is only a matter of degree. But it irks me that all consumers of products advertised on FB are essentially paying a surcharge for the “value” of advertising there, which experts have claimed is of unknown efficacy—that is, just because a product is seen by millions on FB pages, it doesn’t mean people are actually going to buy it–they might likely just ignore it, tune it out. But the FB drop is symbolic of just what a house of cards Wall Street is, and how dubious and shaky our economic base can be. If a company can drop in value by $20 billion in a matter of a bad week, isn’t it common sense that it was never worth that much to begin with, or never should have been? Five years after the crash of ’07-08, nothing has changed. Donald Trump still pretends to be a wise businessman. And we might very well end up with a plastic businessman as president, god help us.