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The COMMENTARY Podcast is not the place you want to turn for stock market tips but we do have something to say about the political and cultural meaning of the extraordinary events surrounding the Gamestop stock and the runup in its value. And we wonder at the Biden administration’s foot-in-mouth disease when it comes to job-destroying executive orders. Give a listen.
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I was wondering when someone around here was going to talk about GameStop. Seems like an important story.
Maybe the worst analysis of the memestock phenomenon I’ve heard so far. All the analogies they used were examples of theft, turnstile jumping, flash mobs, etc. Putting up your own capital to prop up a failing business is not theft.
Also, it wasn’t just to “burn things down” as was so ignorantly assented to. That was just the trigger. People were in it to get rich, like tulip rich, like beanie baby rich and if you want to stop that. Well… you can’t.
The GameStop play was basically the plot of Trading Places with Eddie Murphy and Dan Ackroyd.
Without a young Jamie Lee Curtis.
Like hedge fund short selling stock rich.
No no NO!!! You guys completely missed the point. (I only listened to 9:45) …
Short interest in gamestop is at 138%. Its the most shorted stock trading. This has to be the result of naked short selling and that should be illegal. In a normal short trade, one guy borrows a share from another, who turns around and sells that borrowed share. At some future date he has to buy a share to return it. He’s betting the share prices will drop, and he’ll be able to replace the share for less than what he sold it for. … In a naked short no share has been lent. Meaning that a company can be pushed down by an infinite weight of counterfeit shares in the marketplace. This pretty much allows traders to print money from counterfeit shares in unloved stocks.
Its not that these people want to burn down the system – just because. They want to burn down the system because the big cats running the system are cheating.
How do you think it can be, that big investment banks like JP Morgan Chase, can go years without a single day of trading loss?
I’m a big fan of the stock market. It’s great for companies to raise funds and for people to create nest eggs for their families’ futures. But what is the social good of manipulating the market with shorts like this hedge fund did? It does not seem to have anything to do with the actual value of the company. The reddit group manipulated the market to counter the hedge fund. I don’t see what is wrong with that. Why should hedge funds get special protection so they can do dodgy market manipulations? The reddit actions may cause financiers to think twice before they do future shady trades.
As a retired “coder”, I know one does not just quickly learn to code, especially if one is a writer. The minds of writers and coders I’ve known are very different. Having an aptitude for one field usually means not having an aptitude for the other. In earlier podcasts, the writers have joked about how they are not good at math. Someone who does not “get” math is not going to “get” coding.
Indeed. A good experiment would be to take away all John Kerry’s wealth and his livelihood and then tell him to go seek out one of the wonderful new “green” jobs. I surmise that even with government largesse to “tide him over” he’d die. A fish out of water.
It is no different for someone who made a good living say, on the Keystone Pipeline or one of the ancillary businesses it created. Easy to say. Not so easy to do.
Kerry is telling us we can’t have horses before the invention of the automobile. There needs to be a fuel source that is readily available, cheap like oil. Solar panels and windmills don’t cut it. Find something that does and it WILL lead to new jobs. But that is hard. Taking away the old jobs is easy.
While not addressing this specific situation, short-selling does serve a market good in that it allows investors to put downward pressure on a stock value, making it more likely to ultimately reach the “correct” valuation.
If the only way to invest in a security was to go “long”, there would be an bias towards upside pricing. Short-sellling counteracts that.
Yes, provided that there is a real share being shorted, and not a naked short. Naked shorts have the potential to manipulate stocks to be under valued.
In Kerry’s case he would just have to go out and find another $Billionairess to marry …. it’s nearly as easy as learning to code.