Financial Markets

For conservative populists, Wall Street now is the Washington establishment, indistinguishable from the oligarchs of Silicon Valley; Washington, DC; and the New York Times.

Is there really any difference between what the Wall Street elites are doing and what the Reddit traders did? Jeff Deist joins David Gornoski to find out. 

Allowing short selling increases the number of people with an incentive to discover valuable information about firms’ prospects by providing an added mechanism to benefit from information that turns out to be negative. This makes markets more responsive and honest.

America has grown accustomed to decades of "too big to fail," which means making sure the Wall Street elite never has to endure any real pain. It's because of this that pundits were quick to claim the GameStop affair was a grave threat to America.

When small investors lose their shirts by placing unwise investments, do brokerage firms, hedge funds, big banks, etc., come to their rescue? Not a chance. But there was plenty of talk of "rescue" when hedge funders lost money in the GameStop short squeeze.

There's a lot of excessive optimism about the economy during the next four years in America. However, the US still comes out on top when compared to Europe and China.

The ECB is now turning to a new mechanism by which a bond’s value can be legally reduced by the issuer in times of hardship. The purpose is to allow central banks and governments new ways of ripping off the private sector. 

With a sound money, none of these distortions would have been possible: the limitations of the currency itself would have forced an unwinding of excessive risk far before it could become a clash between major hedge funds and Reddit trolls.

There's a lot of excessive optimism about the economy during the next four years in America. However, the US still comes out on top when compared to Europe and China.

No matter how bleak the economy may be, the Keynesians are likely to say, “It would have been worse without us.”