Biting the hand that feeds me, but so what? It's delicious

Cany you see his tears from here? I can.

How a bunch of Reddit amateurs stuck it to Wall Street

The craziest financial story of the week has got to be GameStop stock’s meteoric rise from $6 a share to $340 a share overnight. It all began when Melvin Capital hedge-fund managers decided to short GameStop, betting the stock would fall. But a lot of retail investors viscerally hate billion-dollar hedge-fund managers who make a living manipulating the stock market and driving small investors out of the game.

The investors on Reddit’s “Wall Street Bets” page got together to buy, buy, buy GameStop and drove the stock way up, costing Melvin Capital billions of dollars. You could say it was a massive redistribution of Wall Street wealth to Main Street traders.

Kickboxing champion Andrew Tate said, “If I have to lose six million to destroy Wall Street, I’m ready to f*cking go. F*ck ’em. These people on Reddit are geniuses.” He went on to explain why he and a lot of people don’t like Wall Street hedge-fund tycoons:

“They’re the worst people on earth…they have no talent, they don’t make money, they just have a pot of money and they manipulate markets to make their pot go up with other people’s money and they get bailed out by the government anyway. They’re the worst people in the world.”

Tate laughed uproariously imagining Melvin Capital financial teams waking up to the news that GameStop had a 600% increase overnight and wiped out 30% of their entire net worth. (Tate can be seen in the YouTube video at the bottom of this article.) Rumors of bankruptcy prompted a cash bailout of $2.75 billion by billionaire investors to keep Melvin Capital solvent.

Tate’s assessment may be a bit harsh, I suppose, but as someone who devoted much of his time in the 80s and the 90s ferreting out and pursuing dishonest stock brokers and their employers and witnessed how they lied, cheated and stole from their customers, I share Tate’s disdain for the industry.

I cheered when Bear Sterns went down; the company provided clearing services and financing for some of the worst bucket shops then operating — the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’s Stratton Oakmont was just one of them —so good riddance, and don’t come back.

And the fall of Lehman Brothers, whose phony real estate loan portfolio was leveraged $40-$1, was just deserts. Of course, Dick Fuld, the man responsible, still retains his mansion at 771 North Street, his ranch in Idaho, and the swell digs on Jupiter Island, which he transferred to his wife to shield it under Florida’s homestead bankruptcy exemption, but that’s just part of the game.

Sadly, just as Fuld and his peers escaped justice then, his contemporaries will now; already, NASDAQ and the U.S. government are moving to freeze trading in GameStock to allow the big boys to work out privately the “adjustment” of their losses and return the serfs to their proper place. And this won’t end up well for the amateurs — it never does. Those who came in early and have already gotten out will prosper, late comers will find no chair to sit on when the music stops.

But I understand the anger of deplorables, and their lingering resentment at the Wall Street bailout via TARP, funded by the middle class for benefit of the elite.