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January 31, 2021

GameStop, Idries Shah and non-skeptical lefists

For most of last week, as GameStop, then #GameStop then thanks to Elon Musk #gamestonk trended, the narrative was that this was just a bunch of everyday Joe Redditors and others having fun punking hedge funds etc who had shorted GameStop stock.

Not really, as Russ and Pam Martens have detailed at their excellent site, Wall Street on Parade.

Keith Gill, they detail, is the person goosing this. He has not just basic but advanced FINRA licenses. And, he works for Mass Mutual, which ain't a nobody.

It appears this is Goliaths vs Goliaths, especially as Russ and Pam linked to a Reuters story saying that BlackRock, nowhere NEAR a nobody, has made a killing on this.

And, the Ryan Cohen of the Twitter account on Gill's video (screengrabbed at left) is also not a nobody.

Per Wiki, he founded the company called Chewy, eventually bought by PetSmart. He then went on to become the biggest individual investor in Apple. And, as of the time of the goosing, was the biggest individual investor in GameStop.

That, in turn, led me to further thoughts, and I emailed the Martens on Saturday asking if they had any information on:
  1. Do you think Mass Mutual is already away of Gill's activity? Related: Might this be semi-official but still disavowable?
  2. Further related, especially if Gill is doing this on his own: Might there be other money behind Gill?
  3. Speaking of money ... is it possible that Gill pays out "walking around money" to at least select "influencers" in places like the Reddit subgroup? Related to that: might this be in some version of bitcoin rather than USD if he is doing that?
I'll provide any updates as I get them. (As of Wednesday morning, I have none, even though the Martens have done one post since then, and also even though they responded to me the last time I queried them. This is true both for the questions above and the question below.)

The Martens link to a CNN article to excoriate MSM financial coverage. Let me add a new NYT piece. The Martens imply, per my question 1, that Gill IS a Mass Mutual employee. The NYT says "was" and also doesn't name Mass Mutual by name. (I've added this to my questions to Pam and Russ, and also tagged both NYT reporters on Twitter. We'll see what, if any, response we get from them.)

Meanwhile, non-skeptical lefitsts?

First, this is why I self-identify as a skeptical leftist in the masthead. 

Second, per Idries Shah?

“To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution.

Shah was implying that any complex issue has more than two sides.

That said, while his thought is generally applicable in the world of human endeavors, it isn't always so.

With GameStop, it's not complex. We have one side, and it's called "capitalism." Stop peddling bad narrratives.

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