Analyst Fired Over Fake "iPhone Nano" Reporter

We're not half as bad as JPMorgan's equity research team, who almost single-handedly perpetuated the bogus iPhone nano rumors. Here's how it went down, from Business 2.0:

It started Monday afternoon when Reuters picked up a report from a Taiwan-based analyst for JP Morgan named Kevin Chang. Chang had come across a patent application Apple filed last November 1 for a phone with an iPod-like clickwheel, put it together with some information he had gleaned from unnamed sources in Apple's supply channel and issued a report to JP Morgan subscribers dated Sunday, July 8, predicting that Apple would release a low-cost, Nano-sized iPhone before the end of the year and might ultimately sell 30 to 40 million of them.

JPMorgan released a subsequent report telling investors to ignore those wacky reports from Taiwan, then released another response that the firm sticks by the fact that a lower cost iPhone will be released later in the year (pulling a classic obfuscatory, "see, we were really saying something you didn't think we were saying, despite the fact that we said something else...cough...these aren't the droids you're looking for").

According to the rumor mill, Chang got fired over the incident.

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