GameStop dominated Wall Street in an odd financial tug-of-war. Investors on Reddit bought up the stock after big hedge funds had sold the stock short, essentially betting it would go down.
GameStop’s stock price skyrocketed and short-sellers lost billions. Talking heads scrambled to make sense of the event. But one of the most brain-melting assessments of the GameStop short squeeze came from Bloomberg TV guest and President of Financial Insyghts Peter Atwater. Atwater was so perplexed that he actually compared individual investors on Reddit outsmarting the big short-sellers to the Jan. 6, Capitol Hill Riot during a segment on Bloomberg TV:
This has got anger behind it. And the behavior of the mob in many ways reminds me of what we saw two weeks ago at the Capitol. It’s a mishmash of a whole lot of people.
Yikes.
During the Jan. 27 edition of Bloomberg TV’s Balance of Power, anchor David Westin asked Atwater, “From your research, from your reporting, is this about finance [indiscernible], or is [the GameStop stock surge] actually about politics or about social norms and a real resistance to sort of — some of the institutions we’ve had, including going all the way back to 2008 and sort of a resentment about the fact that perhaps those in the financial system were not held properly to account?” Atwater then answered with his Capitol Hill Riot comparison.
Westin’s only response to that absurdity was, “Again, we’re reaching for analogies because it’s so unprecedented.” He never corrected Atwater for tying Reddit investors to a riot where people were killed.
Atwater said earlier that he looked at the GameStop short squeeze as a consequence of the K-shaped coronavirus economic recovery he had been talking about for the past year. “There's a jealousy. There’s an anger. There’s a frustration at the system. And I think the size of the crowd now encompasses that aspect,” Atwater said.
The more than 700 percent surge on GameStop stock and the billions lost by bigwigs sent Wall Street and the liberal media into an angered frenzy, blaming everything from stock “manipulation” and “Trumpism” to “nazis.”
Conservatives are under attack. Contact Bloomberg News at letters@bloomberg.net and demand it correct Atwater’s outrageous comparison of Reddit investors to the Capitol Hill Riot.
