The ongoing saga of #Gamestonks and the #RobinhoodScandal have rocked WallStreet and Washington, DC alike for almost two weeks. News has broken that Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev will testify before the House Financial Services Committee Feb. 18th. But will they be investigating the Biden Administration for corruption? According to Politico, “House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and other Democrats are vowing to investigate what role Wall Street hedge funds may have played in the move to halt trading.”
A Quick Recap on GameStop, Robinhood & Biden Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
We have been following the explosion of stock shares of Gamestop, AMC Theaters, Nokia and Blackberry fueled by redditors on r/WallStreetBets and Twitter trends like #SaveAMC. This is the effect of “meme stocks” driven by viral trending, and public anger. Here’s a quick recap of what occurred last week.
“Small-time investors using smartphone based trading apps and communicating on forums like Reddit’s WallStreetBets, average, everyday people caught wind that the massive billionaire hedge-funds had bet against the video game retail store operator Gamestop (GME) through “short-selling” The risk of loss on a short sale is theoretically unlimited since the price of any asset can climb to infinity. In other words, incredibly massive billionaire firms have bet massively that COVID19 lockdowns will continue to drive Gamestop’s already low stock value even lower. And some 2.3 million+ individual traders in a reddit forum and now beyond have decided to collectively punish them for profiting off of the misfortune of COVID19.”
Since that story, the losses of the Wall street hedge funds have ballooned to over $70 billion. Robinhood and multiple online trading services shut down trading on the effected stocks on the 27th-28th, preventing users from buying low and only allowing them to sell as prices plunged in a clear manipulation of the market.
Here’s the kicker: Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was later revealed to have taken millions in speaking fees from the wall street firms in 2019 and $800,000 specifically from Citadel, LLC, Robinhood’s largest partner who bailed out the worst hit firm: Melvin Capital. When asked if Yellen would recuse herself, Biden’s Press Secretary Jen Psaki made a clumsy, amateurish attempt to dodge the question. And conservative media pounced.
.@PressSec dodges when asked whether @JanetYellen, who was paid $800,000 for Citadel speeches, will recuse herself from advising Biden on the Robinhood/ $GME situation.
Citadel and partners pumped $2 billion into Melvin Capital to stabilize the fund after GameStop stock soared. pic.twitter.com/P3bgboz9Ey
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) January 28, 2021
What @RobinhoodApp & @TDAmeritrade have done is market manipulation and a BETRAYAL of its users. There is no other way to describe it.
They got Janet Yellen's message.
The People are getting an up-close look at how The System works.
— Young Americans for Liberty (@YALiberty) January 28, 2021
Will The House Call On Yellen to Testify? Will They Investigate Her Links to Wall Street?
Politico reports,
“Robinhood’s decision on Thursday to stop its customers from buying the stocks sent GameStop’s shares plummeting, drawing criticism of the brokerage from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and other lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.”
The question remains: what of the very reasonable suspicions that Secretary Yellen was not only aware of the potential collusion between Robinhood, Citadel and other hedge funds against the everyday people winning at the market, but may have participated? If this is true, than this would represent the most massive cabinet level scandal since the Teapot Dome Scandal in 1921 a century ago!
GameStop Short Sell Firm Citadel Paid Biden's Treasury Secretary Yellen $MILLIONS https://t.co/P9hTwJP9Al
— Jack Posobiec 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 28, 2021
Based on Congresswoman Maxine Water’s comments it seems unlikely, rather CEO Vlad Tenev who undoubtedly bears a lot of responsibility is likely to be made a patsy for a much larger, much more alarming corruption.
“I am concerned about whether or not Robinhood restricted the trading because there was collusion between Robinhood and some of the hedge funds that were involved with this,” Waters said on MSNBC this weekend.
It seems likely that rather than investigate what seems to be an objectively obvious conflict of interest if not fully corrupt collusion, the Democrats will exercise an old trick of theirs: willful denial of reality. Especially with the infamous Maxine Waters holding the gavel.
