The Full GameStop Uprising Saga | The Daily Social Distancing Show

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the stock market america's number one supplier of great depressions as volatile as the stock market can be this has been one of its wildest weeks yet craziest business story out there an internet trading mob is driving gamestop shares higher it appears to spite short sellers look at the stock it's up more than 680 percent so far this year they realized that all of the institutional investors were hedging on gamestop so they just bought a bunch of call options bought a bunch of stock and created the gamma squeeze that you saw on friday okay okay i don't know about you but that explanation is way too complicated short selling the thing of the long cell and then the country look what we really need here is that scene from the big short where margot robbie breaks it down for us in the bathtub you know and uh i actually called her to do that but she blocked my number so uh i had to figure out plan b basically there's a group of people on reddit who don't use the stock market to invest they use it to gamble and yeah that's what a lot of serious investors do too but these guys on reddit are more honest about it and they love to troll the people who aren't so there's a store called gamestop that sells video games not a great business to be in since games can be downloaded now which is why the serious investors decided to short gamestop which means to bet against it but the redditors are gamers who have a semi-ironic love for the store so they started making memes encouraging each other to punish the serious people by buying worthless gamestop stocks now instead of failing gamestop is succeeding wildly not really of course not as a business but come on stocks are never real the serious people have already lost five billion dollars and some giant hedge funds have gone bankrupt got it good now let's get out moggle robbie's bathroom before she gets home and ask me what i'm doing here the last time she caught me here was a bit awkward okay now that we're on the same page yo this [ __ ] is wild and i know some people are freaking out about this people like this isn't how wall street is supposed to work what's going to happen to these poor hedge funds let me tell you something wall street is going to be fine all right there are millions of people who are out of work and thousands of businesses closing and yet the stock market is an all-time high i'm not worried about hedge fund guys they can cry about this on their helicopter that takes them to their boat that takes them to their yacht in fact if anything i think it's actually funny to see how wall street doesn't like it when somebody wall streets them yeah because when they make moves that cost people their homes people in wall street are like hey man those are the rules but when it happens to them they're like those aren't the rules is someone gonna regulate this and these reddit investors are already moving beyond gamestop now they're pumping up the stock prices of other failing companies like bed bath and beyond amc movie theaters and even tootsie rolls which by the way i didn't even know that tootsie roll had its own stock who was that for so it's a candy that looks and tastes like a turd but it also sticks to your teeth you're interested in investing now if you think about it the only reason that these redditors have been able to pull this off is because of the internet yeah think about it like reddit and all these social media they make it possible to get together with people who think like you this wasn't possible decades ago like now if you want to take down a hedge fund you can find people to help you do it if you want to plan an insurrection you can find people to help you do it hell if you think you're the only person in the world who's attracted to that part of the stapler that looks like a face well i'll see you at hotstaplerfaces.com my friend [Music] the gamestop stock explosion you know it's the reason your 14 year old cousin just bought a ferrari traders on reddit sent the stock soaring this week causing billions in losses for the hedge funds that bet against the video game retailers stock and today wall street decided enough was enough and this is a fox news alert now draw your attention to main street where gamestop and amc shares have been tumbling in trading action today as a growing number of firms move to halt trading on some stocks boosted by amateur traders on reddit the action is so wild that td ameritrade and robin hood have restricted trading of these stocks wells fargo also banning its advisors from telling clients to buy or sell gamestop and amc and now the criticism centered on robin hood for abandoning their followers here in favor of helping those who had shorted all these stocks in the first place i don't particularly like the move on robin hood today i'm talking to people this morning that say okay that is anti-capitalism you can't do that a class-action complaint was just filed in the southern district of new york against robin hood and this is what part of it says and i'm quoting purposefully willfully and knowingly robin hood removed the stock gme gamestop from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise thereby it goes on manipulating the open market yeah that's right people wall street was getting rocked so hard by average people buying stock in gamestop that they just stopped average people from buying it yeah the same guys the same guys who are always like the markets must never be regulated they must always remain free those same guys are now like oh [ __ ] the poor people got a hold of the freedom turn it off turn off the freedom so thanks to this ban the gamestop stock that a lot of people bought for a ton of money is now worth a lot less which is probably familiar to anyone who's sold a used game back to gamestop so right now a lot of people are understandably upset about what wall street is doing in fact it's bringing together people from all sides i mean aoc and ted cruz are as far apart as madison and austin and even they're both blasting the robin hood app for blocking users from buying gamestop stocks everyone's mad even people like ja rule ja rule who tweeted yo this is a [ __ ] crime what a robin hood is doing do not sell and let me tell you something when the guy who did the fire festival thinks that you're a fraud man and you're doing some shady [ __ ] [Music] last week you probably remember day traders on reddit shocked the markets by driving stocks in gamestop and amc movie theaters higher than the queen's hay and bridgeton but now reddit has its eye on something even more shiny the gamestop saga continues to grow it's not just stocks anymore though reddit users are buying up silver pushing up the value of the precious metal silver has now hit a five month high at nearly 30 bucks an ounce that reddit group says that they're doing it because big banks specifically jp morgan chase have been quote suppressing medals for a long time over the weekend retail sites that sell silver coins and silver bars said that they were getting hit by unprecedented demand and they couldn't meet it the demand has been incredible pretty much physical silver is almost all gone in terms of live inventory we typically have about a thousand silver products in inventory available for purchase we're getting so cleaned out right now that we're actually last i tracked down to about 80 items in stock which is a number i've never seen before and never thought we would ever see the entire industry is frankly wiped out in terms of actually finding live silver that you can purchase and receive today it's becoming impossible [Laughter] i'm rich rich i tell you that's right people now silver prices are skyrocketing which is going to cause confusion at the next olympics i mean if silver is more valuable than gold everyone's going to try and get second place sprinters will be at the finish line like after you man fdm mines is brought after you no you go i'm always going first bro i'm always going first you go ahead of me why don't you go ahead of me now this time you can go first right now while some reddit users say that driving silver prices higher will [ __ ] banks like jp morgan others claim that this movement is secretly being coordinated by big wall street firms because it would help the banks and i believe this because of course wall street will do that when wall street sees a scam going it doesn't try to stop it it tries to join in if wall street caught you robbing its mom it would be like hey hold her legs down while i take off her shoes sometimes she has cash in there let me get in there let me get in there whether it's coordinated by the banks themselves or not the fact is the reddit surge is now spreading from game stock to silver to all sorts of stocks and one of our correspondents has a pitch for where it should go next are you a redditor looking to stick it to the hedge funds well forget about gamestop and silver you gotta invest in kiwis i'm desi lydic and kiwis are the investment opportunity that wall street doesn't want you to know about they're portable they hold their intrinsic value and it's easy to think you're ordering 10 from amazon and miraculously wind up with 10 crates here's a fact as far as we know every single hedge fund is shorting kiwis and are we going to let them do that to america's national fruit i don't think so but if we all buy kiwis then rocket ship and kiwis are more than an investment they go great in fruit salads they can be organic truck nuts and they're the only fruit covered in fur so if you ever wonder what it's like to take a bite out of a hamster now you can with kiwis and the best part is you don't even have to go through those wall street fat cats to get your kiwis just call me and let me know how many you want whether five or five thousand this opportunity will not last forever got maybe two days tops before it smells so bad in here that my landlord kicks me out so order now and remember the more kiwis we all buy the more the hedge funds suffer it's just economics so call today please honey what did you do i'm handling it [Music] doug henwood welcome to the daily social distancing show good to be here uh from a distance yes yes indeed and it's it's a perfect time for you to be here you have really established yourself as somebody who is not just aware of the market and participates in the market but also calls wall street out for what it really is the biggest story right now is gamestop wall street hedge funds and just a lot of money that is nowhere and yet everywhere in the shortest way possible how would you break this down to somebody who had no idea what was going on most people most civilians who don't really know the markets very well have the sense that it's all a big racket kind of ludicrous not that different from the casino like all this image that wall street likes to cultivate about itself that it's rational and it's allocating capital efficiency and all that efficiently and all that it's just nonsense it's not doing any of those things it does a little of it but mostly it's just a a game to try to outwit your competitors and people on the other side of the trade whatever uh and uh run away with the most money it's just uh there's nothing terribly rational it's driven by emotions and psychology and fear and in most recently over the last year or so by a gusher of something like three trillion dollars in federal reserve money which has been powering the market so it's um that sense that a lot of people have that uh this is all a bit of a racket is completely accurate so it seems like like you're saying it's like basically people came into the casino and said we're going to play against the house and we're going to make a lot of money what's interesting here is a market that is oftentimes termed free and capitalistic has now been stopped can you explain that element why why was the why was it stopped have these people broken the rules have they have they done anything wrong well i think there are a couple of things going on one is you know these redditors they're just the wrong kind of people but they're playing the same game that wall street does and when they're they're getting together talking up a stock talking down a stock trying to figure out the other guy's positions looking who's weak attacking them uh they do wall street professionals do this sort of thing all the time um and i think it's very funny to hear their professions of outrage that this is just not moral you know it's not fair it's like the markets are you know supposed to be you know on the up and up and these guys are not playing fair that's just utter nonsense uh they're just the wrong kind of people but i think the other thing is yeah they just um are trying to protect their own uh and um oh uh robin hood although likes to present itself as the democratic uh institution uh the democratic broker for the masses are going to overturn the wall street order it's deeply plugged into the wall street establishment um that's how they make their money they feed their orders to um establish brokers uh who then make money on those trades by taking a little a little bit of the price um so uh yeah i think they're they are trying to make it an orderly market but they're also trying to uh keep the fences up make sure the rabble can't crash the party so then two questions one what does this tell us about wall street and and the market and two what do we do to improve this because it feels like an unfair system well it is an unfair system uh it's a deeply unfair system and uh one of the things that make me suspicious about all this talk of democratizing the stock market is that the distribution of income and wealth is very undemocratic and there's nothing that you can do about that nothing that a trading platform can do to change any of that i mean the fundamentals of the society are not going to change because some people in reddit got to play in the stock market um but um what does it tell you about wall street it is um largely um of little economic significance the standard story is that the stock market exists to raise money for productive corporations to invest in capital equipment you know buildings machinery hire people do r d it does almost none of that um the market really is more about extracting um value from companies uh for shareholders it's um it really is a machine for extracting value uh for for those the top one percent of society uh the ownership of stocks is extremely concentrated something like 95 of all stocks are owned by the richest five percent um and you know a few guys on reddit are really not going to change that fundamental fact so for those people who are on reddit you know for the people who came in because they liked that um you know that gamestop got a new ceo you know those people who who actually wanted to invest the people who said i believe in the future or screw the the hedge funds what position are they in now i mean are they at risk of losing a lot of money now or are they in a position where they've made so much from the initial investment that if they get out they're generally going to be fine yeah i think you can exit a position you just can't start a new one um which you know it's somewhat reasonable okay um but you know i think some peop some people are gonna really lose a lot of money if people um who are sensible enough uh sold into this rally you know if you bought it at 50 or 100 and sold at 300 or 350 you're doing pretty nicely um but you know just looking at the the the chart for trading in gamestop today it was you know went from something like 350 to 150 you know during the course of the day it's been an utterly crazy wild ride nothing none of it making much sense at all um now i think a lot of people however are going to hold on to their positions hoping that well if it went to 350 it can go to a thousand on twitter today somebody said to me 4 000 with you know eight or ten rocket emojis afterwards this is the nature of bubbles you know this larger issue here is that the entire stock market is in an epic bubble i mean really one of the great bubbles of all time uh the the market has only been valued this highly at a couple of previous times in history uh um 2000 at the peak of the dot-com bubble and 1929 before the great crash so you know we're in some really crazy territory and things like this are a sign that uh maybe things are just a little frothy but you know i think there is that sense that when um people uh get uh people who are new to the market get this deeply involved it's a kind of a sign that things are are ripening shall we say um there's a saying on wall street that a bear market is when money returns to its rightful owners and i think uh we you know i don't know what's going to set off that bear market bubbles always go further than you think they could there's certainly no rationality to this at all but at some point somebody's going to be left holding a very depleted bag before i let you go does the person who is holding the depleted bag determine how the situation is dealt with so if the big players on wall street if they're the ones holding the depleted bag is it going to be dealt with differently from the government versus if like the people on the ground are holding the depleted bag oh absolutely there's nothing right now that we can see that would require any kind of government bailout you know a couple of hedge funds may blow up but nobody cares there's no systemic risk around that you know much the worse for them but um you know i think if some wall street people left uh like let are left holding the bag there may be some bailout if you know larger entities than just a few hedge funds we'll run into trouble we'll have a government bella that's always what happens wall street's quite quite an amazing game um they there's always this every i don't know 10 to 15 years they seem to run into a wall and the government bails them out so you know they learn um that they can get away with anything there's this famous story about sonny barger the old hell's angel who woke up from a coma after a motorcycle accident uh and uh the the nurse said to him well i hope you learned your lesson mr barger he said yes i did she said what's that and he said i can do anything in survive attitude that wall street cultivates they can do anything and survive um the only thing that would really change anything is if there's enough popular outrage that said we really need to regulate this casino seriously we didn't really have that serious set of reforms after the 2008 financial crisis right you know all right but not serious it was not like the reforms that happened after 29 to 32. um so maybe maybe maybe if we see some kind of very serious smash up uh we might finally uh wake up and have some kind of regulation of this this and saturday doug hanwood thank you so much for joining us on the show i hope to see you again anytime thanks the game stop uprising the biggest thing to happen with video games since sonic got busted for doping but if you haven't heard the news what happened was that some wall street hedge funds bet a lot of money that the stock price of the video game store gamestop would fall but a bunch of people on reddit found out about those bets so they started buying gamestop shares so that the price would go up and the hedge funds would lose a lot of money and lose a lot of money they did in the billions of dollars so as you can imagine wall street is pretty unhappy with those reddit investors a handful of industry leaders are calling for an investigation because of the angry mob that's formed against them last week wasn't a free market it was a free for all market no doubt about it for my 25 years in the business i've never seen this form of collusion on such a widespread fashion this type of behavior is not the behavior that you want to be replicating i think there's something obviously wrong and it's the gamification of wall street talked to an analyst this morning guys he said this is dangerous they they forget they're buying a stock and a piece of a company it's not just some symbol that you play hot potato with just because you throw the hail mary pass in your backyard and it's caught for the touchdown and the wind doesn't mean you're tom brady what's going through my mind is is how irrelevant i feel and how every day i just don't want to get out of bed and how it's the least amount of fun i think i've ever had oh man these wall street guys are taking this so hard that their interviews are just turning into therapy sessions i feel so irrelevant right now and i'm not having any fun and i i just remembered my parents never hung my paintings on the refrigerator but the truth is what the reddit says did he has nothing new in fact the only thing that makes this so unique is that this is just the first time that the little guy has used the big guys tactics against them because when it comes to manipulating the market and treating trades like a game no one is better at it than wall street i mean they do this [ __ ] all the time in fact let's take a look at a few examples starting with the scam one big bang pulled just a few years ago the new york times reporting over the weekend that goldman sachs is running a scheme to artificially inflate aluminum prices an aluminum warehouse controlled by goldman sachs holds the equivalent of a quarter of the annual north american demand for the medal but only offloads or distributes a required minimum of 3 000 tons a day no more no less whatever the demand pushing prices of the metal higher even as demand has declined goldman profits from this practice two ways first from the extended rents paid to store the metal and second by the bets made on aluminum futures by its trading arm the inflated aluminum pricing by goldman and other financial players has cost american consumers five billion dollars over the last three years yeah that's right basically goldman sachs manipulated the supply of aluminum by only letting out a little bit at a time you know the same way daniel day-lewis limits the supply of movies he's in i mean the dude's only been in six movies over the past 20 years the rock made that many movies yesterday get to work danny by the way for the rest of the segment i'm going to be pronouncing it aluminum even though the correct pronunciation is aluminium but we had a vote and all the people i work with are american and so they won and i didn't want to accept the election result but then i was like no we don't want to do that again and i'm sorry guys but aluminum should never be hoarded it needs to be used the way god intended to make condoms for robots or for marjory taylor green to wear as a hat and believe it or not goldman sachs got away with this scheme for years until people caught on to it so i guess you could say that their aluminum plan was foiled wow now as crazy as this is it's actually a common tactic with wall street you take over a market and then manipulate its supply to drive up the price like how jp morgan used its control over electricity to fleece california jp morgan chase accused of manipulating energy prices and so driving up the electric bills of millions of americans at night when energy prices are very low essentially they would bid them up so that in the morning the companies would go to buy energy and find the prices artificially high takes a few hours to get a power plant going so they would have to buy the energy in the morning when it was very very expensive in one case jp morgan duped california utilities into paying 999 dollars per megawatt hour when the going rate was only 12 yo this [ __ ] is crazy it's like these guys were sitting around the table like i'm tired of just abusing our power metaphorically let's do it for real basically because of jpmorgan the cost of electricity went up from 12 dollars per megawatt to almost a thousand dollars per megawatt even amish people were like yo i don't even know what electricity is but that [ __ ] is messed up b i hope the amish community doesn't come after me on twitter for that one i mean at that price i would actually be less upset if you jumped me and robbed me at least then it feels like you had to work for it and the truth is people this isn't something hedge fund people are ashamed of in fact some of them even brag about it on the tv jim cramer once made a fortune running a successful hedge fund he went on to host his own tv show mad money that offers stock tips to investors but as kramer has found out lately a lot of americans are mad at him this video made in 2006 has suddenly gone viral kramer explains to his own financial website thestreet.com how he could influence stock prices up and down as the manager of a massive hedge fund you know a lot of times when i was short at my hedge fund and i was positioned short meaning i needed it down i would create a a level of activity beforehand that could drive the futures it doesn't take much money but it's a fun game and it's a lucrative game and i would encourage anyone who's in the hedge fund game to do it because it's legal right and it uh it's a very quick way to make money and very satisfying okay um by the way no one else in the world would ever admit that but i could care these people got no shame no shame zero nada zilch he's just out here boasting about his evil plans i mean the only people who do that are hedge fund guys and bond villains i mean listen to him listen to him talk about it it's legal and it's very satisfying just as a general rule whenever you have to remind someone that something is legal it's probably shady you know no one's ever like hey trevor you want to go to the cheesecake factory it's legal uh but when it comes to hurting people in order to make a buck nothing compares to the great recession of 2008 which was caused by guess who wall street manipulating the markets during the hot housing market banks took millions of home mortgages many held by people who could not afford them and bundled them into packages as mortgage securities jp morgan today admitted that it sold those packages to investors even though its executives knew that many of the mortgages were highly suspect when the market collapsed those packages became mostly worthless goldman sold investors subprime mortgage packages but then made its own bet those same investments would lose value without telling investors goldman employees themselves use profanity to disparage the deals boy that timberwolf was one deal and when asked if any of the executives at least felt partly responsible for the financial collapse there's things that we wish we could have done better in hindsight or even regret regret to me means something that you feel like you did wrong and and i don't have that when you hear your own employees or read about those in the emails do you feel anything i i think that's very unfortunate to have on email are you embark and very unfortunate i don't i don't email him please don't take that how about feeling that way i think it's very unfortunate for anyone to have said that god damn even the crowd you see them even the crowd in the chamber was like oh you know how bad you have to screw things up to turn a sanitary into a jerry springer taping but this is how you know how psychotic these guys are not only did they tank the economy but they talk about emotions like they're serial killers do you regret hurting these people regret is a thing that one feels when one has done something wrong i mean how can you expect these guys to change their behavior when they can't even express their remorse the closest wall street comes to reflecting is doing coke off of a mirror so after all the damage wall street has done to people's lives please miss me with all of this whining about how unfair it is for reddit to boost gamestop and don't get me wrong i'm not saying all these reddit guys are heroes but i will say it has been fun watching how some of the people who got rich off of gamestop have been spending their money while gamestop has mentioned plenty of millionaires many retail investors are using their more modest profits to pay bills one reddit user even posting that he paid off his student loan debt thanks to the money he's made off of gamestop the last few days ten-year-old jaden carr two years ago his mom bought him 10 shares of gamestop as a kwanzaa gift back then they were six dollars each now he sold them for more than three thousand dollars what are you going to do with the money that you've made on gamestop i've already saved 2 200 of it and the rest of the thousand is going to go to invest in more companies hunter khan cashed in on the gamestop phenomenon last week but didn't just cash in for himself he used some of the money he made to donate six nintendo switches and games to the children's hospital in minnesota one day trader who cashed in on the craze walked into a gamestop store this week and started handing out hundred dollar bills to employees after the robin hood app halted trading on gamestop one investor charted a plane to fly a banner over the company's headquarters saying suck my nuts robin hood oh that's a gangster move right there it's like twitter but in the sky now you could say it's childish to spend money you took from wall street to dunk on wall street and that may be but in the words of jim cramer it's legal and very satisfying [Music] you

Channel: The Daily Show

Views: 940,285

Keywords: the daily show, trevor noah, daily show with trevor noah, the daily show episodes, comedy central, comedians, comedian, funny video, comedy videos, funny clips, noah trevor, trevor noah latest episode, daily show, trevor, news, politics, daily show trump, trevor noah trump, trump, wall street, gamestop, hedge fund, corruption, goldman sachs, jp morgan, robinhood, stock, stock market, stock exchange, stock shorting, reddit, reddit gamestop, market manipulation, banks, hedge funds

Id: l2FuK4ij6ys

Length: 29min 43sec (1783 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 06 2021