The Facebook IPO as a cultural event was bizarro, especially if you suffered with a vicious hangover after the .com boom. But the allegations of selective disclosure of material information about the company’s business prospects to preferred investors in advance of the IPO? That’s a different story entirely. We’ve put together a timeline of the events relevant to these new allegations.

It could turn out that the selective disclosure investigations may provide us, as if we needed it (see, e.g., JP Morgan), with another window into the systemic corruption of Wall Street. In that sense, these allegations may reveal less about Facebook, Inc., than about a financial system that survived its own self-inflicted near-death experience in 2008 with its venality intact.

David Kurtz

David Kurtz is Managing Editor and Washington Bureau Chief of Talking Points Memo where he oversees the news operations of TPM and its sister sites.