Game Stopped

I don't have much to say on the GameStop short squeeze, because there are so many moving parts to this story that I can't make a great deal of sense of it.  But here's the basic story: Small-time investors on a Reddit site pushed up the stocks of underperforming companies like the GameStop video-game store chain, BlackBerry, and the AMC theater chain to make a profit of the stocks' increased value and to stymie hedge-fund managers, but then the Robinhood company intervened and cooled things down by putting a stop to people using its platform to open new positions in the stock.  Lots of people are angry about this, because this means that the little guy can't game the system like the fat cats can.

And that is exactly why U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) is mad at both sides, seeing no fine people on either. She wants to have Wall Street re-regulated to the point where the stock market once again becomes a platform for investing capital into companies that produce things, not a platform to bet on one stock or another.  I'll never forget what Nicholas Brady, Treasury Secretary under President George H.W. Bush, once called stockbrokers - "riverboat gamblers in three-piece suits."

Maybe this kerfuffle in the stock market, coming at a time when we're in a major recession caused by an ongoing pandemic, is the first sign that, at long last, the get-rich-quick mentality of Wall Street that has been going on for forty years finally peters out.  But who knows?

The GameStop short squeeze is too big an issue for me to delve into too deeply.  I recommend the Wikipedia article on the story if you want to understand it better.