Financial Markets

Shorting more than the total outstanding shares isn’t perverse or fraudulent, whereas naked short selling—depending on the context—might be.

Behavioral economists and psychologists define as irrational anything that doesn't fit into a narrow model of behavior. Anything "irrational"—like buying the "wrong" stock—must be fixed with government regulation.

Behavioral economists and psychologists define as irrational anything that doesn't fit into a narrow model of behavior. Anything "irrational"—like buying the "wrong" stock—must be fixed with government regulation.

For conservative populists, Wall Street now is the Washington establishment, indistinguishable from the oligarchs of Silicon Valley; Washington, DC; and the New York Times.

Is there really any difference between what the Wall Street elites are doing and what the Reddit traders did? Jeff Deist joins David Gornoski to find out. 

Allowing short selling increases the number of people with an incentive to discover valuable information about firms’ prospects by providing an added mechanism to benefit from information that turns out to be negative. This makes markets more responsive and honest.

When small investors lose their shirts by placing unwise investments, do brokerage firms, hedge funds, big banks, etc., come to their rescue? Not a chance. But there was plenty of talk of "rescue" when hedge funders lost money in the GameStop short squeeze.

America has grown accustomed to decades of "too big to fail," which means making sure the Wall Street elite never has to endure any real pain. It's because of this that pundits were quick to claim the GameStop affair was a grave threat to America.

There's a lot of excessive optimism about the economy during the next four years in America. However, the US still comes out on top when compared to Europe and China.

The ECB is now turning to a new mechanism by which a bond’s value can be legally reduced by the issuer in times of hardship. The purpose is to allow central banks and governments new ways of ripping off the private sector.