Saagar Enjeti: Wall Street Elites DESTROYED, Beaten By Redditors At Their Own RIGGED Game

all right sagar what's on your radar well there are many enemies of the people in the american elite almost too many to count but if you were to put a gun to my head and force me to choose which specific area of american life most are concentrated it probably wouldn't surprise many of you to hear me say wall street and among wall street it is the hedge funders and within the hedge funders it is specific set of people known as the short sellers for years the short sellers have colluded amongst themselves used the media and more to manipulate markets and specific stocks by forcing massive runs on well-meaning companies all so they can make billions on the flip side none of this has anything to do with creating value making money in a good fashion or anything of production it is simply leeching off the american financial system to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars for a select group of the financial elite and for years they've run the table until now we're the first populist uprising in finance just toppled a few select wall street titans which is ushering in what i hope is a new era of democratized finance now before i begin i want to make clear i do not condone short selling buying stocks gamification or speculation in fact i mostly think it's bad for everyone and you should in no way construe this segment as financial advice so let's get to our tale it starts with gamestop yes you heard me right gamestop that store that you probably haven't been to in like a decade now the story of gamestop and its recent market actions is itself a tale of corruption within the wall street elite and how a band of mostly young underemployed and spiteful millennials banded together to make them pay a real price for the first time in decades major wall street institutions like melvin capital which is managed by gabe plotkin took out huge short positions on gamestop stock they were joined by analysts like andrew left of citron research in taking the public position the gamestop stock would go down now this is a classic wall street maneuver you take a short position you and many others in the financial in circle all say publicly the stock is going to go down which causes people who care about what they do to sell the stock goes down they make a lot of money well now they've been literally doing this for years but then a merry band of people on reddit they took notice on a subreddit it's called wall street bets it has 2.2 million traders and they said you know what hold on a second a user in april 2020 took notice that 84 of all gamestop stock at the time was held in short a massive bet for no discernible reason that reddit user implored others to buy the stock and to instruct their own brokers not to allow their shares to be lent towards short positions of short sellers this alone caused the stock to soar by nearly 50 percent in a single day which is bloomberg notes was the biggest gain in 18 years of the company history but this is where things get really crazy slowly other redditors began to realize that by banding together they could do two things first that their power in numbers combined with the power of trading platforms like robin hood could enable them to act together and two that by pushing the stock up collectively they could make more money and screw over major heavy hitters on wall street to be clear this is all speculative and gambling and it's bad but a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money but if this entire thing is a scheme and it's all made up anyways then why shouldn't the little guys make some of the money instead of the titans and that's what's happened here soon gamestop stock was up in eye popping eleven hundred percent right now as i'm giving this monologue the stock trades around 280 dollars a share less than two weeks ago it was 20. a few redditors got rich a few more are definitely gonna get scammed but what's really beautiful is who lost out melvin capital who is backed by some of the biggest guys on wall street needed a 2.575 billion dollar cash injection yesterday after losing billions on the stock they declined a full 15 in just the first few weeks of the year that's right a bunch of people on reddit with robinhood accounts delivered a body blow to one of the biggest speculators on the street you just love to see it but apparently i'm the only guy in media who does like to see it because over on the financial news channels they are losing their minds in fact since i actually don't watch too much financial news i saw jim cramer of all people who's making sense after an analyst on cnbc accused redditors of possible illegal collusion and then suggested with a straight face it might be foreign powers at work manipulating our markets i'm serious take a listen what kind of case do they have we like the stock we like the stock i mean that's that's the key where ryan cohen got in he bought fifteen percent at eight dollars he's on the board we like the stock how is that bad or do you think that they're concentrating and doing some sort of manipulation if they say they like to stock well i don't know if they're concentrated because i don't have subpoena power and i can't really go it's always been i can i can argue i don't even know if there are foreign powers that work here behind me he's trying to make chaos up our markets is there something in the water with these people they have to blame russia when something happens that they don't like but what really you just witnessed is that when regular people do what the billionaires do then they start crying about crimes they want the sec involved they want to know if it's illegal when the little guy does what they do in a less highbrow version and without a suit on that's what's at play here wall street is shook because multi-billionaires who recklessly gambled on a stock are getting screwed they're targeting average retail investors for having some fun online because it reveals just how much of a sham that this all is people are referring to stocks that redditors are buying like palantir and blackberry and nokia and gamestop as mean stocks with the idea that their value is being memed into existence but let me put on my morpheus glasses and say this what if i told you that many of the most valuable stocks on wall street are just as much if not more so of a joke and a meme it's just that the people doing the memeing in their case has nothing to do with the normal people who are buying them but instead an internal cartel of elites who take massive bets on normal companies and then manipulate markets through their allies in the media or by convincing other big shot investors to follow their lead in other words it's all fake all of it what the wall street elites can't stand is that the people other than them are making money and over on cnbc they're already campaigning to use their connections in government to go after take a listen and there is something inherently wrong within the regulatory structure if this can be allowed oh now something's wrong it really is incredible after looting billions during this pandemic trillions of dollars in bailouts what prompts a call for government action on cnbc it's people making money online at the expense of the billionaire gambling class well i for one think that the little guys online deserve just as much of a shot to be reckless as the hedge fund class so game on and crystal this i've loved this story i've been following it now for you know the last 72 hours or so and it's just incredible and just this morning i wanted to make sure i could pull this too cnbc squawk box had the gall to have on the ceo of the nasdaq the trading platform so in which they were calling for more regulation when's the last time that you saw the head of a trading platform call for more regulation let's take a listen i'm serious i want you guys to see this one of the things that we're talking about is maybe misinformation and and uh pump and dumps and it's occurring on social media again it just i'm wondering whether that's part of the same problem the type of regulation that that uh that we finally need to to consider and like i said we should always have a light touch with regulation but you're you're seeing the way things can get started again this is different maybe it's reddit maybe it's not facebook but you're seeing the the the same situation at this point it's not about an election it's not about a an insurrection but there are interesting things happening that that seem to be spawned to some extent or at least at least blown out of proportion by social media again adina well i i do think though that as we look at these new technologies that are there available to everyone including investors i i think it's also important for regulators to understand that you know manipulation is manipulation whether it's happening through a new technology medium or it's happening through traditional mail so i think it's just a matter of making sure that we understand what the behavior is what's underpinning the behavior and working appropriately with the regulators to to uh to manage the situation oh yeah now they want regulation they can let high frequency traders flash crash our markets they let people drive up stocks they meme their they've been memeing this stuff for decades right but now that it's not them that they can't control the information flow now they want to use the power of the sec and vincent to go after a bunch of people on reddit who are making like five hundred to a thousand okay again you just compared it to stop the steal there we go like oh this is misinformation add that to the dude it was like it could be foreign my god put it straight into my veins this is all amazing and all of your you know caveats this is not investing don't do it it's bad any of it like it's gambling it's reckless it's all that stuff but they are trying to pull off and and have actually i think pulled off the rarest of rare occurrences which is an actual transfer of wealth from wall street that's right to main street i mean without getting too bogged down in the mechanics of that that's basically what you're talking about here we always say on this show that the stock market is just a graph of rich people's feelings now there's one teeny tiny little asterisk where it's a graph of these like regular people on reddit many of whom have gotten completely screwed over during the coronavirus pandemic and so they have a lot of time on their hands to look around at these stocks and see what's going on of them being able to actually get in on the game and to watch these people lose their minds is incredible we were just looking at a story just before we came on that shows you how fake the market is how elites are allowed to rig it and use it to their advantage all the time with zero consequences whatsoever nancy pelosi is actually betting on tesla knowing potentially that biden's electric vehicle plan would benefit like how is that legal how is that kind of stuff legal and you're worried about people on reddit just being like hey let's buy this stock yeah i mean i remember we actually covered this show i wanted to make a bring it up back in march remember billionaire bill ackman he went the stock market spiraling during a 28 28-minute interview he's one of the first people to say this thing is crashing well at the same time he was buying shares at the market bottom what's different about that nothing but nobody cares bill bill's he's a smart guy right it's all good but when these guys do it when bill does it do you see the ceo of the nasdaq calling for regulation of his friend or for the sec commissioner or any of these other people investigating them absolutely not they can't they can't they cannot fathom that people are realizing it's all a fugazi like they say in wolf of wall street and whenever people average people begin to realize that and then realize that it's just this old system you know of just archaic people working the phones with each other selling stocks back and forth taking out massive short positions and more that they were making billions that all of a sudden now that you can put the id in people's heads that you can disrupt that you can't take that away right so when you can't take that away then you have to use the government in order to crack down on them and we got to fight against this as hard as we can look if they want to pass a blanket u.s law banning all speculation i'm down all of it let's do it i'm i will put you know my seal of approval endorsement i'll fight as hard as i possibly can but that ain't going to happen they just want to ban other people speculating and not their own speculation that's what they can't stand and here's the thing is like it's not i don't want to be overly simplistic here it's not like short selling is always bad yeah short sellers actually uncovered what was going on with enron short sellers uncovered some of them what was going on with the housing crisis and the financial bubble there but what you see in this instance with gamestop is that they just kept doubling down doubling down on this position and aggressively destroying this company and driving into the ground which has real world consequences for for example the workers the workers who you know rely on an income from working at gamestop they're they were so greedy and they pushed this thing down so far and had had such an aggressive short-selling position that's what they're getting punished for if they had shorted this in like a reasonable way and they would have made plenty of money there but the fact that they wanted to drive the stock into the ground and essentially force a bankruptcy that's what they're ultimately getting punished for here so good i love to see it yeah i'd love to see that you're making all of these people so incredibly uncomfortable that they're crying to the bite administration for new regulation amazing yeah and i'm sure you know somebody in the biden might also be like this is terrible but not you know the rest of the stuff that happens within the market it's just amazing and one of the things that we're beginning to realize if it's all fake then we can mean what we want into existence we can actually use our power as people in order to make it so that the stocks reflect what we want valued in our society i was joking with some friends so i've seen these new things hedge funds are now hiring chief meme officers to try to get their portfolio companies real get me i thought that was a joke that's a real thing that's a real thing don't you can't put anything past these people they're scum but you know what we should volunteer to try and push stocks up that are actually productive like steel companies or the companies that actually pay their their workers well and more so if we have that within our power why don't we do it because this is an easy way you know it's free market at its best and that's something that we need to what it is is with the internet and more we've seen this with how bernie sanders how much he raised his campaign 250 million dollars a lot of money on an average donation of 20 even on the trump campaign look i mean you could say whatever you want about trump but like the guy raised a lot of small dollar donations with the power of the internet and collective action you can actually take major players down in politics not always going to work out it's a very entrenched system but this is actually a very hopeful and inspiring story yeah or you could think about it's actually really interesting because you could also think about um pushing up the stock value of companies that really have broad-based profit sharing agreements so that their workers and employees are actually cut in on when that stock price goes up um anyway is a fascinating story it is a really like it really is a sort of titanic shift in the way that people are thinking about approaching the markets and of course the elites are losing their mind over it loving it next on rising team rising is going to join us to discuss the latest on trump's second impeachment trial that when rising returns

Channel: The Hill

Views: 1,510,829

Keywords: Rising, Krystal Ball, Saagar Enjeti, Progressive, Progressive Politics, Democrats, Democratic Party, Republicans, GOP, Republican Party, Wall Street, Reddit, Stock Market, Stocks

Id: 9ToOGrUQ7ME

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 27 2021