{"id":43125,"date":"2021-01-29T12:05:56","date_gmt":"2021-01-29T20:05:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/?p=43125"},"modified":"2021-02-01T11:17:42","modified_gmt":"2021-02-01T19:17:42","slug":"this-time-it-might-really-be-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/29\/this-time-it-might-really-be-different\/","title":{"rendered":"This time, it might really be different"},"content":{"rendered":"

A remarkable series of events culminated in at least one major Wall Street hedge fund on the verge of insolvency and widespread anxiety and even panic from the titans of the financial system.
\n— Glenn Greenwald<\/em><\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

Silver here.\u00a0 Claire asked me to comment on the GameStop short squeeze debacle.<\/p>\n

It’s early, what’s happening is complex, and there are multiple players and multiple levels. These are my first impressions, but the rebellion of small investors against hedge fund billionaires could be a milestone in the rebirth of freedom.<\/p>\n

I’m not going to hash out the whole mess; if you haven’t read the basic background, Glenn Greenwald<\/a> and Matt Taibbi<\/a> have good articles on Substack.<\/p>\n

Tl;dr: An online Reddit group of up to two million day traders decided to invest in an ailing brick-and-mortar company called GameStop.\u00a0 A number of hedge funds had decided that GameStop was in deep trouble and shorted their stock on a huge scale.\u00a0Their intention was to drive the stock to zero. The day traders bought it up anyway, driving the price from $6 per share to over $300.\u00a0 This caused multiple billions of dollars of losses to the short-selling hedge funds.<\/p>\n

This was less about GameStop and more about ordinary Americans mounting a powerful, and at least temporarily effective, attack against the forces they perceive as destroying the economy.<\/p>\n

This isn’t a left\/right phenomena.\u00a0 The day traders aren’t Trumpists, or racists, or progressives, or Antifa.\u00a0 There may be some from each of those groups in among the hundreds of thousands, but those ideologies are not what is driving this.<\/p>\n

It’s closer to a have\/have-not divide.\u00a0Most of the day traders appear to be relatively young, and don’t have a lot of money to invest.\u00a0Their typical stock purchases are from $500 to $2,500. Many are using their latest stimulus checks, which may be all the spare cash they have. I saw several comments bemoaning the $25k required to become “qualified investors.”<\/p>\n

It’s quite possible that large investors noticed what was happening and plunged in.\u00a0 We don’t know now, but the sums are so large that it would be amazing if some big players hadn’t also jumped into this pool.<\/p>\n

The day traders are the tip of a much larger iceberg.\u00a0 People are very, very angry.\u00a0 They were angry long before the election and they are still angry.\u00a0 They remember 2008.\u00a0 They — or their parents — lost jobs, businesses, homes, pensions, and in some cases lives.\u00a0 As they did they watched the biggest and wealthiest banks and investment firms get bailed out. They watched Congress pass a trillion dollar bailout, after initially voting it down, despite overwhelming, highly vocal opposition from their supposed constituents.<\/p>\n

Most of the people devastated by the events of 2008 never recovered.\u00a0 Not even close.\u00a0 An entire generation, and arguably two, has been robbed of opportunity. The gig economy, with its complete lack of any semblance of security, good pay, and benefits, is not a substitute.\u00a0 We’ve all read about millennials living in their parents’ basements.\u00a0 That doesn’t make them happy. Seeing their parents’ misery makes them angry, and seeing the grotesque inequalities in both wealth and the application of law makes them angrier still.<\/p>\n

Some insurgent redditors said they didn’t care if they lost their entire investment, as long as they made the oligarchs pay for the ruin of their families and futures.<\/p>\n

Wealth and power have been concentrating in this country for a long time, and the trend accelerated after the 2008 bailouts.\u00a0 But the same concentration of wealth and power that makes the oligarchy so real and so dangerous also means they are hopelessly outnumbered. They maintain their control by dividing the deplorables and other little people, pitting them against one another in all manner of ways.<\/p>\n

It will be much harder for the powers to divide the have-nots.\u00a0 Even if the Fed, the SEC, and Congress eventually combine to smash the upstart investors<\/em> this mob punishment of the hedge funds shows that the power dynamic has changed.<\/p>\n

Before, the oligarchs could isolate any few who got out of line and crush them. But they crushed too many people in 2008, carelessly, needlessly, and quite deliberately. Those people remember. Their kids remember.\u00a0 Their friends and families remember. Relentlessly grinding Americans under the heels of the crony class makes it hard to forget.<\/p>\n

We have the best government money can buy.\u00a0 My guess is that the hedge fund sharks will get the Fed, the SEC, Congress, and probably some others to ban this tactic, crush the upstarts, and put more curbs on the internet. Glenn Greenwald speculates that Congress may pass something to bail out or protect the hedge funds even before they pass the supposedly imperative stimulus bill. But the redditors and tens of millions of others are mad as hell and they will find other ways to attack.<\/p>\n

The Fed is the driver of the giant money pump that steals from the poorest and gives to the richest.\u00a0 The massive money creation from thin air went into overdrive in 2008 and never really stopped.\u00a0 In 2020 it went into hyperdrive.\u00a0 It’s no coincidence that most of the world’s billionaires did so very, very well last year.\u00a0 It’s not a bug, it is the main feature of the system.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

I’m not very optimistic about people seeing the true nature of the Fed. That requires thought, and most people don’t like thinking at all. But they know they are angry, that they are getting screwed, and that it isn’t going to stop. It’s sort of what happens in hyperinflation; when everyone finally realizes the prices are going to keep rapidly rising, the financial system collapses.<\/p>\n

In this case it isn’t just prices, but the whole rotten\u00a0system.\u00a0 Wall Street was once admired, a place where price discovery and investments helped America grow.\u00a0 Now it is almost universally reviled, seen as a rigged game that has destroyed the economic future of tens or hundreds of millions of people while providing grotesque amounts of wealth to a very few well-connected and powerful people.<\/p>\n

The masters are very, very afraid.\u00a0 They were already afraid.\u00a0 Mordor-on-the-Potomac is surrounded by razor wire and filled with uniformed troops.\u00a0 For decades, standing orders forbade most military members from wearing their uniforms in DC lest everyone see the Imperial Capital for what it really is. Now they no longer hide\u00a0it.<\/p>\n

The oligarchs and their servants are very dangerous, and their terror makes them even more so. But if enough people get angry and withdraw consent, they grow ungovernable and the jig is up.<\/p>\n

The nature of this attack is that unless they shut down the entire internet, it is easy to find countless new targets of opportunity. At the core of all big tech are masses of millions of people who are products, not customers.\u00a0 But the same tools that can aggregate billions of mouse clicks and eyeball views are available to like-minded people to congregate and organize.\u00a0 The GameStop debacle provides a blueprint for a new variety of guerilla war – with literally millions of have-nots taking on the few and powerful.<\/p>\n

The next targets will not be limited to stocks – expect all manner of monkeywrenching on a grand\u00a0scale.<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A remarkable series of events culminated in at least one major Wall Street hedge fund on the verge of insolvency and widespread anxiety and even panic from the titans of the financial system.
\n— Glenn Greenwald<\/em><\/p>\n

—–<\/p>\n

Silver here. Claire asked me to comment on the GameStop short squeeze debacle.<\/p>\n

It’s early, what’s happening is complex, and there are multiple players and multiple levels. These are my first impressions, but the rebellion of small investors against hedge fund billionaires could be a milestone in the rebirth of freedom.<\/p>\n

Continue readingThis time, it might really be different<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,21,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-money","category-monkeywrenching","category-resistance","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43125"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43140,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43125\/revisions\/43140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}