The Reddit Gamestop Wall Street riot just keeps on rolling.
Anyone who is still labouring under the impression that this month’s Wall Street bloodbath is simply going to go unchecked should slam back a hard cup of coffee. It essentially involves group of amateur investors on a Reddit community that spear-headed a short-squeeze against hedge funds on Gamestop stocks to the tune of billions of dollars.
If we were to put our tinfoil hats on, we’d say that it seems the 1% react quite quickly when their pay margins are affected.
In the last 24 hours not only did the RobinHood trading app (and several other amateur trading apps) ban buying stocks on companies they had tagged as ‘volatile’, but Facebook has gone as far as to ban the popular RobinHood trading group on its platforms, citing alleged policy violations.
The US Senate Gets Involved
Now it seems that the high-echelons of US authority have gone from simply ‘monitoring the situation’ to taking steps to investigate how Wall Street got ganked by ‘amateurs’ in a matter of weeks. According to a report on The Verge, the incoming chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Sherrod Brown, is planning to hold a hearing on “the current state of the stock market” in the wake of what transpired this month.
Now, before you reach for the keyboard and hammer out your recent hot-takes against ‘the man’, it’s worth hearing Brown out about which direction this process may potentially head in.
“People on Wall Street only care about the rules when they’re the ones getting hurt. American workers have known for years the Wall Street system is broken — they’ve been paying the price,” Brown said in a statement Thursday.
“It’s time for the SEC and Congress to make the economy work for everyone, not just Wall Street. That’s why, as incoming Chair of the Senate Banking and Housing Committee I plan to hold a hearing to do that important work.”
There’s no word yet on when the hearings will take place but, at the time of this writing, it looks like Washington is in two-minds about what transpired over the last several weeks. This may perhaps be down to the fact that the amateur investors who short-squeezed Wall Streets hedge funds on Gamestop stock didn’t do anything illegal.