A group’s petition to reinstate Austin’s camping ban will appear on the May ballot after the city clerk certified enough signatures.
The Office of the City Clerk confirmed Thursday the petition submitted by Save Austin Now met the minimum requirement of 20,000 verified signatures to put it before voters. This is the second time Save Austin Now has attempted to bring this issue to the ballot, the first time they gathered signatures during the summer of 2020, the city’s analysis indicated the group did not gather enough valid signatures to do so.
A city spokesperson told KXAN that the City Council will now have to decide whether to adopt the ordinance changes as written in the petition, or call an election for May 1. The council has until Feb. 12 to make this decision, and there is expected to be a special meeting to discuss these issues on Feb. 9.
Up to this point, Save Austin Now has identified as an educational nonprofit and is led by Matt Mackowiak (the chair of the Republican Party for Travis County) and Cleo Petricek, who has been vocal about her opposition to the city’s recent policies related to homelessness. The Save Austin Now website notes its leadership includes Austin Police Association President Ken Casaday, president of UT safety group SafeHorns Joell McNew, and former Austin City Council Member Ora Houston. Now that this measure will be going before voters, Save Austin Now will have to register as a Political Action Committee with the city to handle activities for the election.
An Austin City Council who respected common sense and the will of citizens would go ahead and reinstate the camping ban, so that will never happen. Instead expect a vicious campaign from Mayor Steve Adler, Austin City Councilman Greg Casar and the other advocates of the Homeless Industrial Complex to smear those backing reinstatement of the ban as “white supremacists” (the reflexive go-to smear for the hard left in 2021) and wanting homeless people to die.
In their ongoing attempt to inflict bumville on as much of Austin as possible, today the Austin City Council is scheduled to vote on buying a Williamson County hotel to use as a homeless shelter.
The Williamson County Commissioners Court has asked the Austin City Council to delay a decision for six months on whether to buy a hotel to house homeless people. The hotel, the Candlewood Suites near Texas 45 and U.S. 183, is in part of Austin in Williamson County.
Commissioners said Tuesday they did not learn about the city’s possible $9.5 million purchase until recently, and have not had time to assess the effects of the purchase.
“I am asking the city of Austin to communicate with stakeholders,” said Commissioner Cynthia Long. The hotel is in her district.
“As of last Friday, the city of Austin has not reached out to any government that might be impacted — not Williamson County, not Round Rock ISD, not Bluebonnet Trails (the local mental health authority), not Williamson County and Cities Health District,” Long said.
The Austin City Council postponed a decision on whether to buy the hotel at 10811 Pecan Park Boulevard from Jan. 27 to Wednesday at the request of Council Member Mackenzie Kelly, who represents the district where the hotel is located.
For those unfamiliar with Austin geography, that’s way out in suburbia near the intersection of 183 and 620:
Kelly is hosting a town hall meeting about the hotel from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday at [zoom link].
Austin officials notified Long about the hotel on Sunday, said Andy Hogue, a spokesman for Kelly, on Tuesday. Hogue declined further comment.
Kelly, who was elected in November, campaigned heavily on a platform that many of the city’s policies regarding homelessness were not beneficial.
On Sunday, residents of the Pecan Park and Anderson Mill neighborhoods held a protest about the plans for the hotel.
Hotel owners and residents who own property near Candlewood Suites told commissioners on Tuesday that homeless people who camp in the area already were causing problems.
“If the city buys Candlewood as a homeless shelter it would just zap our business,” said Marie Chaudhari, one of the owners of the Hampton Inn that shares a driveway with Candlewood Suites.
“Ever since homeless camping was allowed on the streets,” Chaudhari said, “crime has increased so much we had to hire a security guard.”
Candlewood Suites is located in the Williamson County portion of NW Austin. The city wants to buy it and transform the property into a homeless shelter and resource center.
Tuesday, members of the Williamson County Commissioners Court made a formal request for the city to hold off for 180 days. It’s because they learned about this project a few days ago.
The motion to hit the brakes was made by Commissioner Cynthia Long. “My hope is that the city of Austin will hear what we said and it’s an ask to work with your neighbors,” said Cynthia Long, Williamson County Commissioner for precinct 2
Residence and business owners near the hotel say they were also blindsided by the city plan. “I think it would be important to have the public to have input to help out affect their neighborhoods,” said a woman who lives near the hotel.
Those who attended Tuesday’s meeting asked county officials to step in and help. “As Williamson County judge I’m deeply disappointed and that someone did not communicate with this court prior to the decisions they made,” said Williamson County Judge Bill Gravell.
The unanimous vote to make an official request for a 180-day pause was celebrated as a big step — but not a win.
“Yes finally, it should’ve been City of Austin‘s job to listen to its constituents but apparently at least, I’m so thankful for Williamson County to be present for us out here,” said Rupal Chaudhari, who works next to Candlewood Suites
The goal is to convince the city to do an economic impact study; similar to what the city requires private developers to do. Residents believe the study will show that property values will collapse and businesses will close.
The continuing lockdown has proven that Mayor Steve Adler and the Austin City Council really don’t seem to care how many local businesses close.
“Freda I think has about 50 employees we have about 20 at one hotel and the next hotel will have about 30 so that’s hundreds of jobs impacted just right there,” said Sanjay Chaudhari, the Hampton Inn & Suites General manager which is next door to Candlewood.
Williamson County commissioners questioned why the city chose a northwest Austin site for its homeless hotel idea after a similar plan for a South Austin site failed last year. They also want to know more about how the city will address transportation issues, security, as well as what type of social programs will be provided; and where the funding for that will come from.
“Actually it’s not weighing in on the proposal at all because quite frankly I don’t know enough about the proposal to be for or against it I’m simply asking and I think the commissioners’ court is asking to work with the county to work at the school district to work with the surrounding neighbors to talk about this,” said Long.
If the city ignores the county request, commissioners sent another message. They’re willing to explore all options in order to have their concerns addressed.
Hopefully that includes lawsuits.
The repeal of the camping ban has created homeless encampments under virtually ever overpass along 183. My amazing psychic power predict that the new homeless hotel will have absolutely no effect on those existing Adlervilles, but will only draw more transients (and crime) to north Austin.
It would be nice to think that the Austin City Council might listen to citizens for a change, but they seem hellbent on shoveling more money into the Homeless Industrial Complex.
Following yesterday’s story, I got pushback from readers that asserted the supposed WallStreetsBets silver squeeze was, in fact, a ruse from hedge funds to distract retailer investors from the GameStop and AMC squeezes.
If you haven’t been browsing WSB or doing your own research, you’d probably think that the people on Twitter are correct in saying there is a silver squeeze happening and we should all get in on it. There are quite a few wsb-logo Twitter accounts pushing this. This is BS & the straight up the ANTITHESIS of who we are.
By buying silver/going long on silver, you would be directly putting money into the pockets of the EXACT HEDGE FUNDS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF $GME 🚀 🚀 🚀 💎 🙌 The hedge funds are LONG silver NOT short silver.
The media, Wall Street, normies, and every other non-WSB autist are trying to push you to buy silver. This would be a tragic, irreversible decision that not only will most likely not make you any money because the squeeze is fake, it will put you on the sidelines from this righteous and glorious war we are in.
Another sign it’s a ruse: Citadel Securities, one of the primary hedge funds backers, evidently holds shares in 17 different silver companies.
That’s one of the problems with a decentralized swarm attack: If nobody’s in charge, then it’s much harder to filter out the noise to determine the true direction of the swarm. That can be a strength, but it also makes the swarm vulnerable to ruses like this. Extracting a signal from the huge wave of noise in everyday financial transactions is a daunting problem under the best of circumstances even when giant hedge funds aren’t baiting friendly MSM outlets with elaborate ruses. (Or, I should say, when giant hedge funds aren’t baiting friendly MSM outlets with elaborate ruses even more than they usually are.)
Whatever the source, many bullion dealers were reporting a huge run on silver due to a spike in demand, though physical silvere seemed to be doing much better than “paper silver” (i.e., the futures market). Today spot silver prices are back down in early trading.
Remember, I said yesterday that a silver squeeze was unlikely to work.
With that out of the way, here are some other WallStreetBets/GameStop/etc. news:
Adam Ford with Not The Bee explains the GameStop short squeeze, including more background detail on the origins of the squeeze than was in my original post:
Glenn Greenwald goes into more detail on the GameStop squeeze and Melvin Capital:
The usual Greenwald leftwing caveats apply. (Hat tip: Zero Hedge.)
GameStop stock is back up this morning after Robinhood lifted restrictions on buying shares.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has launched an investigation into “Robinhood, Discord, Citadel and other trading apps that put curbs on stock trading” in GameStop.
Noon Update: And now GameStop, AMC and Silver are all way down right now. Never invest what you can’t afford to lose…
Silver Bullion Market is one of the most manipulated on earth. Any short squeeze in silver paper shorts would be EPIC. We know billion banks are manipulating gold and silver to cover real inflation. Both the industrial case and monetary case, debt printing has never been more favorable for the No. 1 inflation hedge Silver.
Inflation adjusted Silver should be at 1000$ instead of 25$.
Signs that the silver market was about to get hit by a GameStop-style short squeeze emerged Wednesday.
That’s when comments began appearing on the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets — the investor board now famous for tripling the video game company’s shares this week. People started egging each other on to pile into silver’s largest exchange-traded product. Banks have been keeping silver prices artificially low, they said, masking an actual shortfall of supplies. Help put an end to “THE BIGGEST SHORT SQUEEZE IN THE WORLD,” one poster said.
To say there was a strategy would be overstating things. At about 8:30 a.m. New York time on Thursday, day traders bent on teaching some banks a lesson began flooding iShares Silver Trust. Their buying drove up prices of the underlying metal by as much as 6.8%, the most since August. And just like that, an ETF became the Trojan horse that helped the Reddit hoards break through the gates of the commodities world for the first time since they began upending equities.
It rippled across the entire silver complex. Miners of the metal rallied. Futures gained. A record 3.1 million iShares Silver Trust options contracts traded. The volatility was unlike anything James Gavilan, a commodities market consultant with over two decades of experience in precious metals, had ever seen.
It was “mind-boggling, breath-taking, it’s shocking really,” he said as prices continued to rise further.
Another sign that they’re having a real effect is yesterday’s email missive from gold and silver dealer APMEX:
In the last week, we have seen a dramatic shift in Silver demand from our customers. For example, the ratio of ounces sold per day was running about two times earlier in the week and closer to four times the average demand by the end of the week. Once markets closed on Friday, we saw demand hit as much as six times a typical business day and more than 12 times a normal weekend day. Combined with the extremely high demand levels, we are also seeing a surge in new customers. On Saturday alone, we added as many new customers as we usually add in a week.
This morning spot silver is up over $30 an ounce, various stock brokers are evidently breaking down on the volume, and physical silver rounds are sold out at various silver dealers, even at $6 over spot (which is nuts).
Another sign that the effect is real is that silver is rising but gold remains flat, an unusual circumstance that never seems to hold long for precious metals whose prices have historically risen and fallen together.
Silver has always been populism’s precious metal of choice, with the bimetallist “Free Silver” movement of the late 19th century culminating the William Jennings Bryant’s famous “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896.
Unlike GameStop stock, I actually own physical silver as an emergency hedge against hyperinflation, so the Reddit raiders already made me a little money. And there’s more than a grain of truth to inflation being higher than government indexes are letting on, largely thanks to the huge liquidity the Federal Reserve and other central banks have pumped into the world economy. I do think it is prudent for anyone with sufficient capital (i.e., you’ve paid off your car and credit card debts and have, at an absolutely bare minimum, three months of living expenses in the bank) to keep a certain amount of physical gold and silver in a secure location (and I suspect at least half of you are immediately going to think “gun safe”) you can easily access, just in case.
But color me skeptical that not only can they get silver up to $1,000 an ounce (barring a runaway hyperinflation takeoff), but that they can have any long-term effect on the market. Tangible commodities are fundamentally different than shorted stocks. A big rise in the price of silver would trigger the reopening of dozens of currently shuttered silver minds around the world to meet demand.
Silver is a truly global commodity in a way that GameStop stock is not. I am skeptical that the WallStreetBets crowd has an adequate grasp of the size of the global silver options picture. Traders in Tashkent and Singapore probably never heard about GameStop until this year, but they’ve watched the rise and fall of silver prices for a long, long time.
I’m old enough to remember that there have been several rounds of apocalyptic bullion hype over the years. My father lost quite a bit of money betting on gold futures in the early 1980s, sure than inflation would continue to rise, but instead Paul Volker and Ronald Reagan managed to kill it dead.
This was about the same time the Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market. Silver started 1979 around $6 an ounce, and briefly peaked above $49 in January of 1980. By June of 1981 Silver was back to trading in single digits, and the Hunt brothers lost their shirts. (There are some parallels with the GameStop squeeze, namely that the Hunt brothers were doing a lot of their buying using options and credits, like some (but not all) of the WallStreetBets crowd.)
The bullion market also has a way of defying your expectations. I was sure that the subprime meltdown in 2008 would send gold and silver soaring. Gold jumped in September, then settled back down below it’s September rates before ending up modestly up for the year. Silver actually ended the year down.
The world economy is an enormously complex organism. You can temporarily jolt some parts of it, but then other parts compensate. Rising and falling prices are timing signals that constantly shift money around to make sure supply meets demand. Investing in silver means opportunity cost in not investing in index funds, Apple stock, or even Dogecoin (way up for the year, but down off last week’s peaks).
By all means, hold gold and silver as a hedge against inflation. But don’t bet the farm on silver hitting that moonshot target of $1000 an ounce anytime soon.
Edited to add: Read the comments. A lot of people are saying this is jamming from the hedge fund backers to take the pressure off GameStop and AMC, and not an organic push for silver from the WallStreetBets core crowd.
What better Sunday viewing fodder than tanks, Walt Disney, and Hitler in Hell?
That’s just the beginning of the full video, which gives more technical detail and instructions on how to use the rifle:
The Boys Mark 1 antitank rifle was based on an .50 BMG cartridge upped to a .55 projectile, and was the primary anti-tank weapon available to the British Commonwealth at the outbreak of World War II. Could it actually take out German Panzers?
Eh. Sort of. Briefly.
The Mark II variant bullet was capable of penetrating “0.91 inches (23.2 mm) of armor at 100 yd (91 m).” So it could theoretically take out Panzer Is and IIs. But Panzer IIIs, starting with the Ausf. D version in 1938, had at least 30mm armor, so they were already useless against German medium tanks when the war began. So it was pretty much obsolete when the Walt Disney video was made.
Here’s Ian McCollum talking about the rifle:
And here he is firing it:
And finally, because of the name of the rifle, and because it’s my blog, and because why the hell not:
The astronomical rally in GameStop has imposed huge losses of nearly $20 billion for short sellers this month, but they are not budging.
Short-selling hedge funds have suffered a mark-to-market loss of $19.75 billion year to date in the brick-and-mortar video game retailer, including a nearly $8 billion loss on Friday as the stock kept ripping higher, according to data from S3 Partners.
Still, short sellers mostly are holding onto their bearish positions or they are being replaced by new hedge funds willing to bet against the stock. GameStop shares that have been borrowed and sold short have declined by just about 5 million over the last week, marking an 8% dip in the short interest, according to S3. Most of the short covering occurred on Thursday, when the stock fell for the first time in six days.
“I keep hearing that ‘most of the GME shorts have covered’ — totally untrue,” said Ihor Dusaniwsky, S3 managing director of predictive analytics. “In actuality the data shows that total net shares shorted hasn’t moved all that much.”
“While the ‘value shorts’ that were in GME earlier have been squeezed, most of the borrowed shares that were returned on the back of the buy to covers were shorted by new momentum shorts in the name,” Dusaniwsky added in an email.
Shares of GameStop were back up Friday after Robinhood and other retail brokers allowed trading to resume.
The borrow fee on GameStop’s stock — or the cost-to-borrow shares for the purpose of selling them short — jumped to 29.32% on existing shorts and 50% on new short positions, S3 said.
“If most of the shorts had covered, we would not be seeing stock borrow rates at these high levels — by now you would be able to borrow GME stock at single digit levels due to an increase in the lendable stock loan supply due to borrowed shares being returned after all the ‘supposed’ buy-to-covers,” Dusaniwsky said.
GameStop remained the most-shorted name in the market as short interest as a percentage of shares available for trading stands at 113.31%, S3 said.
(Supposedly Melvin Capital and Citron are out of their GameStop short positions. So who is still in?)
Assuming all the above is true, the remaining hedge funds and their allies are still shorting more than 100% of the stock, despite the theoretically infinite risk involved. I can think of several theories to explain what appears to be apparently irrational behavior:
Short sellers fully expect their friends in the Biden Administration and/or the financial regulatory apparatus to come to their aid and extricate them from the bind they’ve put themselves into by suspending or changing the rules. Huh. I wonder why they could possibly think that?
Janet Yellen accepted $810,000 in speaking fees from Citadel, owner of Robinhood.
Reporter: Are there any plans to recuse herself from advising the President on GameStop and Robinhood situation?
Psaki: ‘No and she’s an expert and deserves that money.’
Short sellers expect to use their power to force trading companies to bend to their will by forcing retail investors to sell their shares (as Robinhood was reportedly doing on Thursday).
Short sellers expect one or more “whales” (i.e., rich individual investors) to flip and either sell their shares or lend them out to cover shorts once the temptation to take profits is too great.
Deeper-pocketed short sellers expect the squeeze to force weaker rivals out of the game, either taking huge losses to liquidate their positions or going bankrupt. In either case, they expect this winnowing to drop shorted shares below the 100% threshold, relieving the pressure on the shorts for the remaining short sellers.
Obviously, it could also be a combination of all these. (Or something else; feel free to float other theories in the comments.)
It’s the first two possibilities that should worry us from a policy position: If the big players can break the rules at will to reverse their fortunes when they’ve been beaten at their own game by the little players, then it’s not a free market. And if it’s not a free market, what’s to keep ordinary Americans from getting out of the game entirely?
At one point, it was estimated that the losses accumulated by GameStop short-sellers approached $5 billion. Melvin Capital, the now-notorious hedge fund with the huge GameStop short position, eventually required an infusion of $2.75 billion in cash from an even larger hedge fund to cover its possession and remain solvent.
And that’s when the Wall Street empire struck back. Suddenly, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, which purports to be a Wall Street regulator but instead operates as little more than a Wall and Broad soothsayer to a public skeptical of Wall Street’s power, weighed in and intimated that it might investigate or even shut down the trading of GameStop stock to prevent the price from getting even higher.
Then the Wall Street-backed trading apps and the Wall Street brokerages joined in, announcing they would no longer allow their users and retail investors to buy GameStop stock. The result? When you can no longer buy a stock, its price can only go in one direction: down.
The whole saga has spawned a mini-industry of commentary on trading, markets, Wall Street, hedge funds, regulation, efficient markets theory, and who knows what else. Hedge funds are bad! No, hedge funds are good! Markets are efficient vehicles for asset price discovery! No, we need strict regulation to prevent mob-incited runs on banks!
They all miss the point. What’s happening right now has nothing to do with hedge funds or free markets or pricing theory or any of that. What’s happening right now is another front in the major war taking place in institutions and countries across the world: It’s the elite versus the populists.
Wall Street has a long, storied history of viciously crushing short-sellers. It’s something of a local pastime. Just ask David Einhorn, who wrote an entire book on the industry’s efforts to destroy him for the crime of shorting the stock of a bank that was covering up the fact that a huge chunk of its loans were garbage and would never be paid back. The GameStop saga isn’t about the benefits, or evils, of short-sellers.
The real story is how “retail investors” — the industry term for regular people who day trade now and then or have a small brokerage account for retirement or to buy stocks every now and again for fun — figured out how to take down a financial leviathan. It’s not that Wall Street dislikes retail investors, it’s that Wall Street views them as little more than commission factories for the big brokerage houses.
Those rubes don’t know anything. They’re not sophisticated. They don’t have the credentials or pedigrees of the geniuses who simultaneously destroyed the housing market and economy in 2008. And they certainly don’t have the power to move markets.
It’s Wall Street’s job to move markets. It’s Wall Street’s job to tell people which stocks and bonds to buy, which conveniently just happen to be the same assets that the mega-banks are desperate to get off their balance sheets.
A bunch of trash, mortgage-backed securities based on mortgages that will clearly never get paid back? Just put them all in the same garbage bag, claim they couldn’t all possibly start to rot at once, and then demand that the ratings agencies whose salaries you pay stamp them not as trash, but as pure gold. Then, when magically all those bags of garbage start to stink to high heaven, why, then it’s time to demand that the federal government — funded by those retail investor rubes who will probably lose their jobs and homes and savings because of those bags of Wall Street’s garbage — bail every last one of them out.
See, retail investors don’t move markets. Until they do. Which, in the case of the Redditors bidding up GameStop stock, they did. And that cannot be tolerated. The whole GameStop saga isn’t about finance or politics. It’s David vs. Goliath, the have-nots vs. the haves, the underdog vs. the heavy favorite with the best talent and training and equipment money can buy. It is a perfect microcosm of the war between the populists and the elites, the individuals vs. the institutions, the people vs. the powerful.
A bunch of internet randos found a way to take financial advantage of a company that had backed itself into a corner. They banded together, executed the strategy, and made bank. They used the exact same rules and systems that Wall Street has used for decades to screw individual investors out of their money.
That was the Redditors’ real crime. Because that’s not allowed. You are not allowed to use the same set of rules for your own advantage.
The rules here are simple: Heads Wall Street wins, tails you lose. The institutions set the rules, not you. The elite, not the populace, will determine what is allowed and what isn’t.
Former President Donald Trump is not interested in forming a third party and pledges to remain involved in Republican politics. Suck it, Lincoln Project. (And by “it” I mean “your complete irrelevance” and not “the genitalia of teenage boys”…)
The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t.
The failure began with the country’s top consultants and pollsters. Candidate Trump did almost everything lavishly paid political consultants would have told him, and did tell him, not to do — and he won. The most respected pollsters, meanwhile, predicted a landslide for Hillary Clinton. America’s best and brightest political adepts turned out to know very little about the elections they claim to understand.
Also during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency. That these cultured authorities couldn’t tell the difference between a populist protest against elite contempt and a coup carried out by powerful ideologues will go down as one of the great fiascoes of American intellectual history.
The fascism charge was only the most acute form of the claim that Mr. Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Some semantic clarification is in order here. When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”
Mr. Trump assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word, but he did so only after the 2020 election. That effort was discreditable and disruptive, but it was also delusional and ineffective. It was not the assault the president’s expert-class critics had foreseen.
Perhaps those critics failed to understand Mr. Trump’s assault on democracy because they had carried out a similar sort of assault in 2016-18, with the support of the federal bureaucracy and the nation’s political and cultural elite. I’m referring to the Russia scare: the belief that Mr. Trump won only because his campaign “colluded” with agents of Moscow, and that his election in 2016 was therefore illegitimate. The theory made sense only if you couldn’t grasp the obvious reasons for Mr. Trump’s victory, namely that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate and that Obama-era progressivism had become sufficiently unpopular in the Midwest to throw the election to the nationalist candidate. Somehow it was easier for smart and accomplished people to believe that a TV celebrity and political neophyte with attention-deficit issues had entered into a diabolically ingenious pact with a foreign dictator in which the dictator helped him pick up just enough votes in the states he needed to win.
It took a 22-month investigation by a special counsel to establish an absence of evidence that Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with the Russians. America’s best minds and most influential leaders had spent more than two years obsessing over an idiotic conspiracy theory.
This spectacular failure of the expert class would have been impossible without the willing support of a credulous news media. That Mr. Trump won the presidency largely by denouncing the media should have suggested to leading journalists and media executives that something in their industry had gone badly wrong. Instead most of them took his rise as license to indulge their worst instincts.
Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump’s unique evil. They regarded every preposterous accusation put forward by his political foes as reasonable and likely true. The repeal of “net neutrality,” an Obama-era regulation on internet service providers, heralded the end of the open internet (it didn’t). The administration built “cages” in which to cram children of illegal border crossers (it didn’t). The president praised neo-Nazis as “very fine people” (he didn’t). His postmaster general was removing mailboxes to steal the election (an obvious lie). In retrospect, it was hardly surprising that so many Americans believed Mr. Trump’s fictitious claims about the election. Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.
America’s foreign-policy elite didn’t perform appreciably better. For decades, they had insisted that peace between Israel and the Arab world was impossible without a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem. It was an axiom, no longer up for debate. Mr. Trump followed through on a promise long made but not kept by the U.S. government to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Foreign-policy experts the world over predicted hellish payback from the Arab world, but the recognition went forward, the U.S. Embassy moved, and the payback consisted of a day’s worth of inconsequential protests.
Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco announced they would establish formal relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia may do the same. The foreign-policy clerisy, having been wrong about the central question of global diplomacy for the past four decades, predictably ignored these achievements.
In the few short days following the collapse of President Donald Trump’s attempts to bring evidence of electoral fraud to the attention of the state legislatures and the courts—not to mention the calamitous events of Jan. 6—the ascendant left has moved swiftly to capitalize on what has proved a stunning propaganda victory for them and neutralize their enemies on the right.
Forget the looting, burning, and general civil unrest at the hands of BLM and Antifa in cities across America last summer—for which next to no one has yet been punished, and which was widely cheered by both the mainstream media and Democrat politicians up to and including Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. That’s all ancient history now, replaced by the “insurrection,” the “armed riot” at the Capitol, the “worst attack on Washington” since the War of 1812, when the British burned the capital and the White House.
Of course, it was not. Unrecalled by the born-yesterday media, for example, is the 1954 attack by four Puerto Rican separatists on the House of Representatives, during which some 30 shots were fired and five congressmen were wounded; the terrorists were later pardoned by Jimmy Carter in 1979. Also forgotten: the bombings of the Capitol building and the Pentagon in the 1970s by the radical leftists of the Weather Underground, led by Barack Obama’s buddy William Ayers.
George, where you make a mistake is that people coming from the liberal side like you, you immediately say everything’s a lie instead of saying there are two sides to everything. Historically what would happen is if said that I thought that there was fraud, you would interview someone else who said there wasn’t. But now you insert yourself in the middle and say that the absolute… fact is that everything that I’m saying is a lie…. Let’s talk about the specifics of it. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of absentee votes had only the name on them and no address. Historically those were thrown out, this time they weren’t. They made special accommodations because they said, oh, it’s a pandemic and people forgot what their address was. So they changed the law after the fact. That is wrong, that’s unconstitutional. And I plan on spending the next two years going around state to state and fixing these problems and I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say, there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud. No, let’s have an open debate. It’s a free country.
The global semiconductor shortage is still slamming the auto industry. Tempted to do a separate “explainer” post about how the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry and how hard it is to add capacity.
The order, which is the first the governor has signed since October and the first non-coronavirus related order since the pandemic began last year, directs agencies “to use all lawful powers and tools to challenge any federal action that threatens the continued strength, vitality, and independence of the energy industry.”
“Each state agency should work to identify potential litigation, notice-and-comment opportunities, and any other means of preventing federal overreach within the law,” it states.
“And when they do that,” added Abbott during the press conference, “that will arm Texas to be prepared to fight back.”
The governor called the order “a homework assignment for every state agency in Texas.”
It will be swell to see democrats squander tens of millions of dollars on a race they can’t win yet again…
“State Rep. Bryan Slaton filed an amendment saying that the Legislature should bring a vote to the floor to abolish abortion before it votes to ceremonially change the names of highways or bridges.”
Netflix goes full social justice warrior, inks deal with Ibram X. Kendi. If you didn’t cancel your subscription over Cuties, now would be a good time to do so. (Hat tip: Blog reader David Rainwater.)
Proof that letting biological men compete in women’s sports is a bad idea. Top male high school athletes routinely beat female Olympians.
The Lamb and Flag, once frequented by the likes of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, has suffered a disastrous loss of revenues since the start of the pandemic.
It first opened in 1566 and moved to its present location on St Giles, a broad thoroughfare in the city centre, in 1613. It is owned by St John’s College, one of 45 colleges and private halls that make up the University of Oxford.
“Until the San Francisco Unified School District board stripped Dianne Feinstein’s name from one of its public schools, we were unaware of the Senator’s service to the Confederacy.”
On one side of the fight are the hedge fund managers. These guys are good-hearted regular folks living out the American dream by manipulating markets so that companies will fail and they can buy another desperately needed yacht.
On the other side are a bunch of Cheeto-stained Redditors who are dangerously manipulating markets to try to make money. These guys obviously weren’t informed that the stock market was only for rich people to make money. They’re probably Nazis and alt-righters too.
“Biden All-Female Communications Team Won’t Tell Nation What’s Wrong, Nation Should Already Know.” “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Nothing’s wrong, OK!?” said Jen Psaki in her first press conference as a part of Biden’s team. “Why would you think I’m not fine? Ugh… if you have to ask, I’m not going to tell you.”
Seldom has Wall Street moved so blatantly and illegally as they have today to crush the retail investors carrying out the GameStop Short Squeeze. This is a fast-moving story, so here are a few highlights from today’s developments:
The Robinhood trading platform has halted trading of stocks noted for being shorted by hedge funds:
Robinhood won’t allow purchases of $AMC, $BB, $GME – ONLY SALES. This is a brazen market manipulation to disadvantage small investors & help big hedge funds like Melvin who shorted these stocks.
If this is true, and it applies to cash-purchased shares and not those bought on margin (a margin call is a different type of beast), then the leadership of Robinhood should be arrested and charged with embezzlement and grand larceny, no matter what their EULA claims they can do.
Short sellers reportedly sustained losses of $70 billion so far in 2021. (Hat tip: Daddy Warpig.)
Sean Davis explains that Wall Street insiders have simply decided that the vile peasants must not be allowed to win:
What’s happening right now is Wall Street realizing that retail investors, whom Wall Street mocks as nothing more than dumb commission factories for big brokerages, actually have some power that Wall Street believes it has a divine right to wield. That cannot be allowed. (2/x)
Wall Street, you see, is allowed to make money no matter what. That was the lesson of 2008. Who cares that it’s Wall Street who destroyed the housing market/economy by lying about the risk of their garbage mortgage derivatives? They were entitled to bailouts. (4/x)
So don’t get conned by those claiming hedge funds are just trying to protect the markets and price transparency and efficiency and blah blah blah. This is a war between corrupt institutions and normal people, and the institutions simply will not allow the normals to win. (6/6)
The #RobinHood scandal reminds me of when millions of Americans organized to flee Facebook & Twitter for Parler—and then a bunch of crooks (Google & Apple) shut it down by pretending that the competition was illegal.
Wall Street & Big Tech are criminal, colluding enterprises.
Literally the world's dumbest fucking people – the absolute dumbest, can't get dumber – are those who don't just claim but really believe Wall St. firms pay powerful politicians gigantic sums for banal 45 minute speeches because they want their wisdom rather than their servitude: https://t.co/fP4DbJKMei
Eric Weinstein’s exegesis on the expansion of wrestling’s kaybafe to the political world may also apply to Wall Street. “Were Kayfabe to become part of our toolkit for the twenty-first century, we would undoubtedly have an easier time understanding a world in which investigative journalism seems to have vanished and bitter corporate rivals cooperate on everything from joint ventures to lobbying efforts.” If all of Wall Street is in on a con game against ordinary investors, and is willing to blatantly break the law to keep any insider from being trounced by mere peasants, then we no longer have anything resembling a free market in stocks. And if Wall Street is running a crooked game rather than a free market, then conservatives are no longer obligated to protect Wall Street. Too cynical? Possibly. But it isn’t a hypothesis we can reject out of hand.
if Dogecoin is up 500%, now I want a more obscure cryptocoin to speculate on…
What really gives me pause is this: Everyone in the world was paying attention to the GameStopo short-selling shenanigans the last few days, and they’re still blatantly, and nakedly, trying to illegally rig the system, even though they’re in the wrong, and even though everyone is watching. If they’re willing to so blatantly break the law with everyone watching, what sort of crimes are they getting away with when we’re not watching?
Here’s a Wall Street story that has everything to do with the current political moment.
GameStop is the video game retailer that almost went out of business last year. This year, a whole bunch of powerful hedge funds bet on GameStop stock going by selling the stock short.
For those unfamiliar, a short squeeze happens when a rising stock price forces short-sellers out of their position. When panic strikes and those sellers buy back stock, they send shares even higher. Here, you have what InvestorPlace Markets Analyst Tom Yeung calls a powerful feedback loop.
Yeung also sees GME stock as being a particularly relevant candidate for a short squeeze. Right now, 71.2 million of its shares are being sold short. That is even more than its total outstanding share count!
Enter Wallstreetbets- A trading/investing subreddit. Someone noted that these hedgefunds shorted 140% of all shares available.
These hedgefunds were so damn greedy, they borrowed more shares than actually existed. That's how arrogant and dumb they were. pic.twitter.com/MpsFwMdqdM
And so we reach our main story of how the hedgefund's greed ruined them.
Realizing that these hedgefunds shorted GME by a ridiculous amount, these Redditors (normal people like you and me), bought every share they could get their hands on. Driving the price up like crazy. pic.twitter.com/ojvdEZhNXb
So eventually, the due date for when these hedgefunds need to return the borrowed shares comes closer.
And what do they do?
They double down.
They short MORE. Because they're sure that they can manipulate the stock enough to get it to crash, thereby saving themselves. pic.twitter.com/xIi5iwpV4h
So the short selling bear hedge funds are totally screwed. The result? Carnage:
Across most of America, GameStop is just a place to buy a video game. On Wall Street, though, it’s become a battleground where swarms of smaller investors see themselves making an epic stand against the 1%.
The funds serving the financial elite are starting to walk away in defeat. Big bets they made that GameStop’s stock would fall went wrong, leaving them facing billions of dollars in collective losses. All the wild action pushed GameStop’s stock as high as $380 on Wednesday, up from $18 just a few weeks ago.
The stunning seizure of power gives some validation to smaller-pocketed investors, many of whom are encouraging each other on Reddit and are trading stocks for the first time thanks to brokerages offering free-trading apps. It’s also left more investors on Wall Street asking if the stock market is in a dangerous bubble about to pop, as AMC Entertainment, Bed Bath & Beyond and other downtrodden stocks suddenly soar as well. The S&P 500 set a record high earlier this week, though it fell Wednesday.
Two investment firms that had placed bets for money-losing GameStop’s stock to fall have essentially thrown in the towel. One, Citron Research, acknowledged Wednesday in a YouTube video that it unwound the majority of its bet and took “a loss, 100%” to do so.
Snip.
Melvin Capital is also exiting GameStop, with manager Gabe Plotkin telling CNBC that the hedge fund was taking a significant loss. He denied rumors that the hedge fund will fail. The size of the losses taken by Citron and Melvin are unknown.
Before its recent explosion, GameStop’s stock had been struggling for a long time. The company has been losing money for years as sales of video games increasingly go online, and its stock fell for six straight years before rebounding in 2020.
That pushed many professional investors to make bets that GameStop’s stock will decline even further. In such bets, called “short sales,” investors borrow a share and sell it in hopes of buying it back later at a lower price and pocketing the difference. GameStop is one of the most shorted stocks on Wall Street.
But its stock began rising sharply earlier this month after a co-founder of Chewy, the online seller of pet supplies, joined the company’s board. The thought is that he could help in the company’s transformation as it focuses more on digital sales and closes brick-and-mortar stores. Its shares jumped to $19.94 from less than $18 on Jan. 11. At the time, it seemed like a huge move for the stock.
Smaller investors were meanwhile exhorting each other online to keep GameStop’s stock rolling higher.
The raucous discussions are full of sarcasm, self deprecation and emojis of rocket ships signifying belief that GameStop’s stock will fly to the moon.
Snip.
There is no overriding reason why GameStop has attracted this cavalcade of smaller and first-time investors, but there is a distinct component of revenge against Wall Street in communications online.
“The same rich people that caused the market crash in 2007/08 are still in power and continue to manipulate the market to get even richer, we are just taking back our fair share,” one user wrote on Reddit.
“hey mom i can’t come up for dinner,” another user wrote. “i’m bankrupting a 10 figure hedge fund with the boys.”
Beyond personal attacks, the battle has also created big financial losses for Wall Street players who shorted GameStop’s stock.
As GameStop’s gains grew and short sellers scrambled to get out of their bets, they had to buy shares to do so. That accelerated the momentum even more, creating a feedback loop. As of Tuesday, short sellers of GameStop were already down more than $5 billion in 2021, according to S3 Partners.
Much of professional Wall Street remains pessimistic that GameStop’s stock can hold onto its immense gains. The company is unlikely to start making big enough profits to justify its $22.2 billion market valuation anytime soon, analysts say. The stock closed Wednesday at $347.51. Analysts at BofA Global Research raised their price target Wednesday — to $10.
All the mania is raising some concern that investors are taking excessive risks, and reporters asked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday whether the Fed’s moves to support markets through the pandemic is helping to push stock prices too high.
In short, the hedge funds suffered a serious bloodletting:
NBC NEWS: Short-sellers lost $14.3 billion today alone on GameStop stock, according to S3 Partners
Did the Wall Street titans laid low by retail investors shrug their shoulders over the loss and slink off quietly into the night to lick their wounds? They did not. Instead, our elites staged a fullbore freakout over being beaten at their own game(stop).
were the ones manipulating the stock, but they got caught, and are now trying to take their ball and go home.
While these hedgefunds are on every news channel screaming about Reddit and Wallstreetbets, they inevitably draw attention to themselves, and what's going on.
Perhaps the most flagrant example was where noted CNN tool Chris Cillizza declared the GameStop short squeeze an example of Trumpism. Because how dare ordinary people think they can beat the elite at their own games?
Hate speech, White Supremacy, Racism, etc. These are the new catch-all for the government violating your rights. https://t.co/JMGS9e6YJW
— Article V Convention of States please (@philthatremains) January 27, 2021
(Babylon Bee: “Merriam-Webster Changes Definition Of ‘White Supremacist’ To ‘Anyone Who Wins In The Stock Market When They’re Not Supposed To’.)
There’s even the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” cliche:
Now they are blaming Russia for the move in GameStop.
Why? Because what they are not saying is the squeeze, along with Biden's destruction of the US economy in the name of climate change, has the potential to trigger a 2008 style financial collapse.pic.twitter.com/crF03bo0jz
And finally, a Berkeley professor wants you know they’re investing in GameStop because they’re not having sex:
Arm young men, in a basement, not at work, not having sex, not forming connection, with an RH account, a phone and stimulus and you have the perfect storm of volatility as they wage war against established players while squeezing the dopa bag,,,harder and harder
Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts William Galvin wants a 30-day trading suspension of GameStop, because retail investors can’t be allowed to make money off the mistakes of their betters.
There are valid reasons for hedge funds and short sellers to exist. But no one, least of all our corrupt political establishment, should let them get away with the classic “I keep my profits private but force the government to underwrite my losses” con game.
Reddit shuts down #wallstreetbets and I honestly think today is a defining day. This is no longer just a war of Big Tech against conservatives. Its just so delicious that @TheDemocrats have officially aligned themselves w Wall Street culture now. #GameOn
lmao some hedge fund might go bankrupt from redditors raising gamestop's stock as a joke.
Newsflash: if you can go bankrupt from one stock going up too much, you are running the same scam as the redditors, the only difference is you wear a suit and tie while you do it.
This may all seem extremely irrational. But thanks to the Federal Reserve’s endless money pump, the market has been irrational for a long time. And the biggest irrationality was short-sellers shorting more stock than actually existed.
I should point out that I have no money in GameStop, AMC, or Nokia stock (unless there’s some tucked away in one of my various 401K funds, which I rather doubt). Though honestly, as weird as this year is already going, I’m tempted to put a few hundred dollars in Dogecoin…
