It’s a picture on Flickr and it works for me. And I would like to note that I have had other posters complain about my posting twitter links, so, whatever. 
Anyway, her response is classic:
My jaw has officially just dropped. In a good way.
Way to go, AOC!
Sometimes people see it as just rich people playing rich people games, I guess - and they don’t see how it affects them.
These financial manipulations, the exploitation of the inefficencies in a complex market, hurt us all. Abusive short selling, flash trading, manipulation of the futures and insurance markets, all these things slow down the growth of your retirement account, just a little bit. They make the returns on your investments a little lower. They make the economy less productive, just a little bit. They ultimately cause you, the average American to make a little less and pay a little more.
As do the more serious financial crimes, the Ponzi schemes, the interest rate manipulations and fraudulent start-ups. They hurt each of us as individuals, families and communities. One of the biggest tragedies of the 2008 financial crisis was how many state and local governments ended up on the wrong side of dishonest trades, effectively transferring your tax dollars, the money you pay for police and roads and parks and community festivals and the like, to the pockets of some wealthy hedge fund owner.
If I could find a way to steal a penny from every man, woman and child on earth, that might be the perfect crime. I would become wealthy without harming anyone else, because who would miss a penny? But if enough people starting stealing a penny from you here and another one there, eventually you’d feel it.
Why haven’t I spoken up before? Because financial crimes —and abuses that should possibly be crimes — bore most people to tears. I’m fascinated by them, myself…but most of them aren’t as dramatic and easy to understand as the Game Stop stunt. When I start talking about the mechanisms used to manipulate interest rates and how everyone should be outraged by manipulated interest rates even if they don’t have outstanding loans or interest income, they yawn.
They don’t see that even if they don’t take out loans, the people that own the stores they shop in do. And if the interest rate on their loan is a little higher than it should be, then their prices are going to be a little higher, as well. Thousands of tiny cuts, pinpricks even, can cause real pain.
One of my frustrations with the way the 2008 financial crisis was covered is that the exposure of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme was treated as an anomaly, this one-off crime that was exposed when the tides receded.
I never I felt that it was. I felt that the Madoff scheme embodied the essence of the financial crisis and the culture that enabled it. But the significant thing about Madoff, one I gleaned from reading and my personal experience ( I had clients that were involved with Madoff and I’m pretty sure one of them engaged me socially once to see if I was worth pitching -I wasn’t, they didn’t, but other consultants that worked for this client did )was the one obvious thing no one would admit
*Everyone knew Bernie Madoff was cheating. They just didn’t think he was cheating them.
It should’ve been blindingly obvious to everyone that Madoff’s stated strategy would not result in the returns he was yielding. This was not a well hidden fraud.
But Bernie Madoff also owned a legitimate company that bought and sold large blocks of stocks for institutional investors. This gave him market knowledge that would’ve made it easy for him to cheat for his clients.
If the company got an order for a large block of stock, an order large enough to drive up the price of the stock, it would’ve been an easy matter for him to slip a small order in ahead of that order at the lower price.
Now, this harms the institutional clients but it’s just one of those pinprick hurts, like stealing a penny from them.
Everyone thought this was how Bernie was really getting those great returns. This is the kind of financial crime that’s countenanced every day. And in Madoff’s case, it was ignored even harder because he had so many charities invested with him. They thought he was a regular Robin Hood, doing a little insider trading to boost good causes.
I’m a big fan of financial regulation. I think banking should be boring af. I’d much rather have slow growing investments that reflect real value, than a wildly fluctuating account with highs and lows that aren’t reflective of reality. But most people like the casino environment, even as they have no interest in what’s going on behind the curtain.
Thank you.
This seems to be a completely obvious and clear conclusion. IMO, this is exactly how this story is going to end. With many Reddit people wailing about how “unfair” it is that they lost a bunch of money.
Really well said.
There are a couple corollaries to that which always come to my mind:
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In the US, we’ve privatized (enormous) profit and socialized (profound) losses. Think about where the money went from the 2008-9 financial crisis. Think about the lives and businesses that were decimated. Think about where the bailout money came from. Think about where the overwhelming majority of the economic recovery $s went;
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The wealthiest Americans almost surely don’t pay anywhere near the taxes they’d like us to believe they do. So we directly underwrite their shenanigans, and ensure they live long lives in unimaginable opulence when they’re done shitting all over the board. Meanwhile – statistically – it’s a virtual certainty that they haven’t done anything of consequence to subsidize the mess they’ve created or help to ameliorate the misery they’ve wrought.
Per capita, the British get off ridiculously cheaply when it comes to subsidizing their royals – at least compared to Americans.
[Hopefully, only slightly OT]
I
If you truly believe this then I have some lovely bridge stonks to sell you.
That’s crap. That’s like yelling at a hold-em poker player who plays “irrationally” and wins the pot. Tough shit. You got out played. My brother was a broker for years and I always got into heated discussions with him about selling short. I hated the concept of hoping a business does poorly in order for me to profit. If you think a company is shit and is going down the tubes, then invest in their rivals believing they will do better with less competition.
A-freaking-men. I got into some wicked fights about how those fucking credit default swaps were a huge pile of bullshit that fleeced us all and how just handing over $700BN when it all went pear shaped was pure fucking garbage–then we did NOTHING to control the market, Obama and then Trump relaxed more and more financial regulations, insider trading became the norm (ask yourself why it’s okay that Nancy Pelosi invested HEAVILY in Tesla stock knowing perfectly well that Biden has an electric vehicle policy set to go) and literally NO ONE has been prosecuted for all this chicanery and fuckery. When millions lose their jobs and businesses as a pandemic guts the world the stock market goes insane and nobody even questions how fucking categorically WRONG that is. Reddit is just yanking back the curtain to show the world how fucked up it all is and how the goddamned financial “wizards” that control our lives in so many ways are just con men sticking a knife in our collective kidneys. Too big to fail? Needs to go to jail.
And everyone keep firmly in mind that even with all the hubbub over Gamestop that the amount of money diverted is only about a QUARTER OF A PERCENT of the overall volume of money running through the system. It’s literally couch change to these privileged fucks–the world stock and commodities markets are worth about 50 TRILLION DOLLARS so ask yourself why it is they’re sobbing and demanding those poor people stop bugging them when they’re playing games with THAT much of OUR economy. Games that actually put businesses into the ground, putting millions out of work. Games that lose people their homes then put those homes outside the reach of any normal person (hedge fund investors have gamed the real estate market in every big city, go look it up) and that cost us all in inflation and lost wages. They can take their sobbing and shove it.
And here it comes–redditors have made enough money to crowdsource some very fancy lawyers.
Haha, UNITY! Prolly not what they were thinking of tho.
Well, that’s simple. Move it to China where it can be put to work efficiently. The fat cats aren’t howling because of purity tests with regards to notions of fundamental concepts like efficiency. They are howling because their rocking chair got their tail.
What’s crap?
Great post. I think a lot of the finance industry is basically a complicated set of obfuscated tricks to enrich the big players in the financial at the cost of the rest of us without adding any real value. Not all of it - obviously there’s a place for stocks and investments - but the more complex and obscure it becomes, the less value is added to society and the more is taken away.
Stealing a penny from everyone in the world is a good example to demonstrate how it’s hard to care about a diffuse problem, but of course we’re well past that stage now. The bigger the players get, the more important the financial industry gets, and the more they capture the regulatory agencies, the bigger chance they have of sending us into a big economy crashing downward spiral, which they’re doing on the regular now. And they’re dominating our lives in other ways. A lot of us will never own a house because they’ve changed owning property to be geared towards being an investment vehicle for rich people more than, you know, owning a home.
I do think more and more people are realizing how hard they are being fucked and the “eat the rich” sentiment is becoming more and more common place. But they’re so fucking greedy that they won’t even release some of the pressure by giving everyone just a little bit. They have to take absolutely everything they can. They’re just begging for something like the French revolution with their greed.
You seem to be laboring under the assumption that the stock market actually reflects something substantial or “real”. As in, if a company’s stock changes in price, that means that something they’ve done or announced implies lower or higher earnings or value.
This is not the case; the stock market is basically a crowdsourced aggregate value for what a single ownership share of the company is worth, and as it’s vulnerable to all sorts of idiocy, wrong-thinking, jumping on the bandwagon, manipulation, etc…
The Gamestop outrage is mostly from people who expect the market to work within certain parameters that don’t include a directed attempt to raise the price, but similarly your outrage is because the market doesn’t behave in a way that’s 100% reflective of each company’s actual business performance.
Because that’s not how the laws work or have ever worked. Pelosi isn’t an insider at Tesla. Nor is President Biden. Neither of them work for Musk, or have anything to do with the company, and AFAIK, neither owns more than 10% of Tesla stock. So not insiders.
You just keep suckling on that boot, friendo, I’m sure your reward is in the mail.
She’s an insider at the regulatory body that determines what Tesla is allowed to do, and personally has the power to change Tesla’s future earnings potential.
The outrage is being expressed by the hedge funds that lost money because the market didn’t behave in the way they tried to manipulate it into working.
You don’t have to be an “insider” to be subject to insider trading laws. If you trade on a tip that you got from an insider, you’ve broken the law.
Agreed in principle.
In matter of law, legislators are specifically exempted.