Tag Archives: GameStop

Wednesday Required Reading

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1. You try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Deep down, there’s goodness. Then this. Criminals are selling fake Covid test results as they look to profit from travel restrictions.

2. What the next generation of editors need to tell their political reporters. A complete rethinking of journalism.

3. Aswath Damodaran makes sense of GameStop.

“The difference, I think, between our views is that many of you seem to believe that hedge funds (and other Wall Streeters) have been winning the investment sweepstakes, at your expense, and I believe that they are much too incompetent to do so. In my view, many hedge funds are run by people who bring little to the investment table, other than bluster, and charge their investors obscene amounts as fees, while delivering sub-standard results, and it is the fees that make hedge fund managers rich, not their performance.”

4. Betraying Your Church—And Your Party. How Representative Adam Kinzinger, an evangelical Republican, decided to vote for impeachment—and start calling out his church. My headline would’ve been, “Don’t Lump All Republicans Together Y’all”. His nickname has to be “Zinger”.

Suck It, Wall Street

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The title of the best GameStop crowd-squeeze story I’ve read thus far. By Matt Taibbi. Taibbi skewers the monied class for their blatant hypocrisy, describing the week’s events as. . .

“. . . an updated and superior version of Occupy Wall Street.”

On the hypocrisy:

“The only thing ‘dangerous’ about a gang of Reddit investors blowing up hedge funds is that some of us reading about it might die of laughter. That bit about investigating this as a ‘pump and dump scheme’ to push prices away from their ‘fundamental value’ is particularly hilarious. What does the Washington Post think the entire stock market is, in the bailout age?”

Taibbi’s short and sweet tutorial on the week’s events:

“Furthermore, everybody ‘understands’ what happened with GameStop. Unlike some other Wall Street stories, this one isn’t complicated. The entire tale, in a nutshell, goes like this. One group of gamblers announced, ‘Fuck you!’ Another group announced back: ‘No, fuck YOU!’

That’s it. Or, as one market analyst put it to me this morning, ‘A bunch of guys made a bet, got killed, then doubled and tripled down and got killed even more.'”

On why Taibbi’s siding with the Redditors:

“They’ve seen first that our markets are basically fake, set up to artificially accelerate the wealth divide, and not in their favor. Secondly they see that the stock market, like the ballot box, remains one of the only places where sheer numbers still matter more than capital or connections. And they’re piling on, and it’s delicious, not so much because they’re right, but because the people running for cover are so wrong, and still can’t admit it.

Buy the ticket, take the ride, nitwits. If you earned anything, it’s this.”