BC POLITICS
Saved by @ThomassRichards

THREAD on Robinhood/Reddit/GME: CONGRESS is calling for action, but no one has clearly articulated what they actually want.

We could look back on this as the biggest “Pump & Dump” in history... with the little guys carrying all the water & then getting it dumped on their heads.

 It started with a SMART discovery, Melvin Capital (hedge fund) broke the cardinal rule of short selling. They took on way too big of a short position given the size of their fund, how heavily shorted the stock already was and the amount of shares outstanding.
Technically, they were RIPE to get squeezed, but there was virtually no case for anyone following fundamentals (earnings, growth etc...) to want to buy this sleepy, brick and mortar video game retailer.
Short selling is absolutely legal and adds to efficiency of the market.
More often than not, the short seller gets hurt & not the company. But there are many who believe it’s harmful to American businesses and short sellers to use media and unsavory practices to put struggling companies in further distress.
This week will definitely bring back the debate on banning short selling. This is a huge win for Elon Musk who has been battling & defeating short sellers for years and wants the practice irradicated.
He’s been unsuccessfully trying to get lawmakers to focus on this for a while.
A few VERY savvy and somewhat anonymous investors spotted this Melvin situation and masterminded a way to enlist this never-before seen “Wall St Betts-Reddit Army” and en masse went on a buying frenzy.
BUT HERE’S WHERE DAVID ABSOLUTELY DID NOT BEAT GOLIATH:
Melvin DID get crushed, but they’ve been completely out of the trade for 2 days, which means the Reddit Army’s
“STICKING IT TO THE MAN” crusade is currently sticking it to your fellow man & possibly getting yourself stuck.
At this point, GameStop is worth $23b and a lot of retail investors own stock in a company worth a tiny fraction of where its stock is currently trading. They could lose 90% because they didn’t understand how the market actually functions.
And other companies in this bonanza, American Airlines & AMC- they’ve already sold shares to raise money, which dilutes everyone and will continue to do so.
And AMC is held by Silver Lake Partners (a massive private equity firm). They already sold out of a massive chunk making hundreds of millions of dollars. That was gifted to them by the Reddit Army marching the stock higher.
There are still SOME shorts, but there are lots of players BIG and very small who own these stocks.
When the music stops and the stocks drop, there will be a lot of pain.
CEO’s of publicly traded companies are worried. Watching how a group can mobilize & go after a target in such force w/ such little underlying logic is very worrisome. Many are huddled up in virtual boardrooms today wondering “what happens when the mob decides they don’t like me?”
As for ROBINHOOD- NO GOOD NEWS to report:
ROBINHOOD proved this week that they are NOT what they promised.
The CEO was happy to announce they have the most popular app, but it’s worthless if it cannot execute trades.
Robinhood users learned The PRICE of “free trades” meant your broker was undercapitalized and couldn’t support the business when you needed it most.
How did that happen?
Robinhood’s model was offering  “free trades”
They drew in scores of individual investors & then sold that order flow to Citadel (which is both a broker/dealer AND a hedge fund - confusing).
But when volume was massive and volatile in a few names, they didn’t have the $$ to meet capital requirements needed when you can’t borrow shares (which is why it only impacted one side of the trade).
They raised $1bn from existing investors Thursday night, so they could fully operate on Friday- but their problems are far from over.

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Reply brief is in. Let's have a look. They are, mercifully, underlength. They had 50 pages available, the PDF is 43 and some of that is cover page, signatures,

Interesting table of contents. Looks like they're packing a lot in, until you realize that much of the material that's important - like their response to the "you sued the wrong person" material and "injury in fact" take up very little space.


Looks like they decided to skip the table of authorities. Presumably GoogleDocWord ate it too bad for them to fix. This will certainly further endear them to the judge.


This is going to be interesting - leading off a reply brief with a "here's what our cause is about" is certainly a strategy. It's even a bold strategy.

Shall we dig deeper, Cotton?


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We’ve been getting calls and outreach from Queens residents all day about this.

The community’s response? Outrage.


Amazon is a billion-dollar company. The idea that it will receive hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks at a time when our subway is crumbling and our communities need MORE investment, not less, is extremely concerning to residents here.

When we talk about bringing jobs to the community, we need to dig deep:
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Displacement is not community development. Investing in luxury condos is not the same thing as investing in people and families.

Shuffling working class people out of a community does not improve their quality of life.

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It’s possible to establish economic partnerships w/ real opportunities for working families, instead of a race-to-the-bottom competition.
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Trump on climate: I don't believe it. Trump on Khashoggi: I don't believe it. Trump on Russia: I don't believe it. Idiocy? A canny game? Doesn't really matter as much as the underlying intellectual autocracy. In this administration only one opinion matters.

It's an assault on facts and reason. It's an assault on good governance. It's an assault on the bureaucracies that are being discounted. It's an assault on science and history. But it is also an assault on one of the underpinnings of democracy.

We live in a system that is grounded on the idea of collaborative government. Leaders may have a final word but even then, there are typically checks and balances. Hopefully, in this case, such checks and balances may work. But they also are being tested.

The president's position that he is smarter than all the world's scientists, than the entire intelligence community, than experts who have studied any issue all their lives, is, of course, asinine. But his belief that government turns solely on his opinion, is monarchic.

Louis XIV reportedly said, "L'etat est moi." That he was the state. Trump asserting that he knows better than all, discounts all advice, that his brain is enough to chart the course for America alone, is essentially saying the same thing.
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Rep. Pramila Jayapal
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We promised people that if we won the Senate, we would send out $2,000 survival checks. They delivered us to victory—and now we MUST deliver.

“Targeting” checks to a smaller group fails to do that. People need help like never before, and we must put money in their pockets.

“Targeting” checks isn’t just bad for people, it’s bad policy too! It’s not humane, it's not smart, it’s not effective, and it’s not even fiscally responsible. Not to mention that it doesn't meet the scale of this crisis.

Help me spread the word about 4 obvious reasons why:

1⃣The survival checks often use 2019 tax data to measure someone’s income.

Millions lost their jobs in 2020 due to COVID—that’s the whole point of this relief!—and therefore their income from 1 or 2 years ago is no longer accurate. They need help now and we must provide it.

Even if someone isn’t one of the nearly 1 million additional people losing their job EVERY single week, they likely lost hours and therefore had their overall income significantly reduced.

By “targeting,” we cut out people who are desperately in need of help.

2⃣The data from people who filed for unemployment shows that more than 20% of those earning between $50k and $70k were still food insecure.

That's up 16% from 2019—and it's why food banks have such long lines. We need to put money in their pockets so they can feed their family.
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Congratulations to Jacobin for, the day after Lula's defense team filed it's 2nd motion to dismiss due to illegal US involvement in Lava Jato, its timid reference to the US DOJ partnership. This relationship has been public knowledge for over 5 years but better late than never.


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