Een
hedgefonds dat middels shortselling het bedrijf GameStop bijna ten
onder deed gaan is zelf slachtoffer geworden, niet van een ander
hedgefonds maar van gebruikers van GameStop die middels het
nieuwsplatform Reddit gebruikers verenigden om samen aandelen van het
bedrijf in te kopen, waardoor de koers door het plafond ging (binnen 1 week met 700 %) en de
shortsellers met enorme verliezen achterlieten…… ha! ha! ha! ha!
Eindelijk een middel om bijzonder foute aandeelhouders plat op de bek te
laten gaan…..

Paniek
op Wall Street:

Gisteren
zijn de oligarchen en hun woordvoerders op CNBC en andere Wall Street
vriendelijke media de hele dag bezig geweest om hun ongenoegen uit te
spreken over de gang van zaken en hebben daarbij van de Biden administratie
stappen geëist: maatregelen nemen om een dergelijke gang van zaken
in de toekomst te verbieden, men durft dit zelfs onrecht en communisme te
noemen….. ha! ha! ha! In feite roepen ze op om hun eigen
instrumenten illegaal te maken, al gaat hun eis daar natuurlijk niet
over, shortselling moet alleen nog worden toegestaan aan ‘serieuze
aandeelhouders en hedgefondsen…….’

‘Geheel
toevallig’ (maar niet heus) heeft één platform de handel in
aandelen GameStop platgelegd en dat op basis van ‘hate speech’,
uiteraard een kul reden, misbruikt om de Reddit groep de wind uit de
zeilen te nemen…..

Het
liefst zou men de hele handel in aandelen van GameStop platleggen,
dit om de smerige aandeelhouders te redden van enorme verliezen, niet
om een goed lopend bedrijf te redden en daarmee de werkgelegenheid
van velen…….

Uiteraard
zal deze zaak verstrekkende gevolgen hebben en het is bijna niet
voorstelbaar dat men deze vorm van bedrijfsbescherming zal verbieden,
immers daarmee zou de hele wereld eindelijk inzien hoe smerig de
handel in aandelen in elkaar steekt……

Hoorde
e.e.a. gisteravond al van een heel
goede vriend en zag vanmorgen dat Glenn Greenwald hier gisteren een artikel over plaatste op zijn eigen website. In een begeleidende
video legt Greenwald uit wat de gevolgen zijn van deze zaak en welke
consequenties dit zal hebben, niet alleen voor Wall Street, maar ook
voor de politiek.

VIDEO:
The Reddit Revolution, GameStop and Melvin Capital

Glenn
Greenwald <greenwald@substack.com>

Jan
28

One
of the most interesting and potentially significant conflicts to
happen in some time — not just financially but culturally and
politically — deserves serious scrutiny.

A
GameStop store in Alhambra, California on January 27, 2021 (Photo by
FREDERIC J. BROWN/AFP via Getty Images)

A
remarkable series of events culminated in at least one major
Wall Street hedge fund on the verge
of insolvency and
widespread anxiety and even panic from the titans of the financial
system. It was all initiated on a sub-group
of Reddit known
for its heterodox interest in stock markets, video games, and vaguely
populist politics.

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Purposely
targeting the stock of a company that had long been written off by
Wall Street and which short sellers had decided to ravage — the
video game retailer GameStop — these small investors, many
apparently working class or debt-ridden, banded together to drive up
the stock price of that company into the stratosphere, abruptly
leaving the hedge fund short-sellers with billions of dollars in
losses.

Front page of the r/wallstreetbets sub-Reddit

Although
it may be more complex than this once all the facts are all known,
this is being treated — by those excited
by it and
those aghast — as a type of populist uprising, a David v. Goliath
tale in which ordinary people united to brilliantly beat Wall Street
at its own game, thereby transferring plutocratic wealth back to the
public. Oligarchs and their media spokespeople spent all day on CNBC
and other pro-Wall-Street outlets expressing outrage and demanding
government intervention to
protect them from what they regard as this grave injustice.

And
the sub-Reddit has
now been banned by
at least one platform, on the highly suspicious ground that it was
due to “hate speech” and not the use of this group to sabotage
Wall Street billionaires (what a remarkable coincidence of timing
that this sub-Reddit’s “hate speech” suddenly crossed a line
exactly as hedge fund managers were demanding their heads; the page
continues, however, to appear on Reddit itself).

In
the video below, I discuss what happened and what the implications
are. One note about the video: though I do discuss the amorphous and
trans-ideological politics driving both the Reddit uprising and the
reaction to it, that topic in particular merits much more
consideration. Liberal journalists and pundits love to mock the idea
that “economic anxiety” drives anything remotely adjacent to
right-wing populism — the primary drivers are racism and other
types of bigotry, they insist in unison — yet all one has to do is
spend any non-trivial amount of time in that sub-Reddit to see
genuine and significant levels of rational economic anger often quite
untethered, even hostile, to left-liberal cultural pieties and
political niceties. Given their recent noble success, everyone
now wants
to claim these
Redditors as their own, but their politics, like many people’s,
defy the clean left-right dichotomy on which the professional media
and punditry classes depend, the only prism through which they can
understand the world.

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This
is one of the most interesting and potentially significant events —
not just financially but culturally and politically — to happen in
some time, and I try here to explain the key components and highlight
some of the most consequential implications [note that this video was
filmed late last night before the banning of the sub-Reddit by
Discord on obviously specious grounds and, far worse, the corrupted
banning
this morning by major trading platforms, including RobinHood, of any
attempts to buy GameStop and other targeted stocks while still
allowing them to be sold: the ultimate expression of what should be
illegal market manipulation to protect hedge funds):