But Tesla has a market share of the global passenger vehicle market of about 1%. It’s just a small automaker. But Tesla’s market cap ($578) is now about equal to the combined market cap ($582 billion) of Toyota (Toyata and Lexus), Volkswagen (VW, Audi, Porsche, and many other brands), Daimler, GM, BMW, Honda and Ford – an amazing sight. Wolfstreet online, cited The Keiser Report December 2020
When the stock market crashed, Franklin D Roosevelt got on the television and didn’t just talk about, you know, the princes of greed. He said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’ Joe Biden, interview Kate Couric 22 September 2008
Mr Dale, the firm is offering you six months’ severance and half your salary. You will keep all invested options you currently hold. Health will be extended through that period. You have until tomorrow at 4.47 to either take the offer or it will be revoked. Do you understand? Margin Call 2011 starring Kevin Spacey & Zachary Quinto & Jeremy Irons & Paul Bettany & Simon Baker & Penn Badeley & Demi Moore & Stanley Tucci & Aasif Mandvi et al, director J C Chandor
Look at these people. Wandering around with absolutely no idea of what’s about to happen. Right? ibid. Peter, risk analyst
There are eight trillion dollars’ of paper around the world relying on that equation. ibid. Jared
Something happened this January that no-one expected. It’s united capitalists, socialists and You-tubers. The idea that an internet forum could take a failing company and by collectively investing in it, or to use the parlance – Taking it to the Moon – take on hedge funds and win seemed impossible. But was this really a people’s revolution? Our World: GameStop: To the Moon and Back, BBC 2021
A year ago GameStop was to many a business slowly dying. It sells physical games at an actual shop, and many on Wall Street thought that that business wasn’t just outdated, it was prehistoric, a business doomed to fail. ibid.
This is the story of how an ordinary bunch of people connected by social media worked together to push up the stock price of a struggling video game retailer. Gamestop: The Wall Street Hijack, DiscoveryPlus 2021
WallStreetBets beings together a global community of amateur investors known as Retail Traders. ibid.
Hedge Funds are betting on GameStop’ shares to go down, not up, and they’re doing it using a technique called Short Selling. ibid.
The Reddit community is aching for a fight with the big shots of Wall Street, and it’s getting personal. ibid.
Gamestop’s shares start climbing, and I mean climbing fast. ibid.
By late January the Hedge Funds start to fail … Overall, short-sellers betting against GameStop go on to lose nearly $20 billion. ibid.
The stock market is an enigma, deceptively complex but also simple. It’s a parallel universe. A nearer version of the real world where you can invest in the future. Gaming Wall Street I, BBC 2022
And when bad players break the rules of the game, when they cheat the market at a push of the button, it hurts people in the real world. ibid.
There’s been an uprising by a bunch of people from the internet who said, Let’s take these motherfuckers down. ibid.
Gamestop: a bunch of guys on the internet going against a hedge fund. ibid.
One study put the dollar amount of the bailout at $29 trillion. And it really wreaked millions of lives. ibid.
Payment for order flow … invisible (but legal) fees brokers can make by directing orders to parties that actually make the trade. Gaming Wall Street II
J P Morgan: they pleaded guilty to a criminal charge of manipulating the precious metals market for eight years. ibid.
Robinhood has denied allegations in the class action lawsuit against them, including alleged collusion with Citadel. We have published their response on the show’s website. ibid. caption
He had an extraordinary ability to manipulate and deceive those around him … Together they lost £830,000,000. Adam Curtis, Inside Story Special: £830,000,000 – Nick Leeson and the Fall of the House of Barings
The boy from the suburbs who wanted to be a trader. ibid.
He chose a British bank … Barings was the oldest merchant bank in Britain. ibid.
Leeson found an operation run on as shoestring … ‘Everything is tacky.’ ibid. Leeson
Singapore: Leeson was going to trade in one of the newest and most exciting of the new market: Futures. ibid.
Leeson’s team began to make serious mistakes … He put the losses into a computerised account called the 88888 account and altered the software. ibid.
Leeson’s deception had gone badly wrong … The secret 88888 account turned into a monster with a life of its own. ibid.
He began to use his secret account to give his clients cut-price deals. ibid.
Leeson was now trapped by his new fake success. ibid.
‘They didn’t understand the basics of the business.’ ibid.
In the 1950s Britain was dominated by a small group of men – the captains of industry. They were eminent industrialists and bankers who met together at the court of the Bank of England. Men like these were powerful because of the vast industrial empire they controlled. They worked in partnership with the politicians to shape the future of the nation. What these men did not realise was that within fifteen years their whole world would be destroyed. Their power would be taken away from them and their factories torn down and sold off. And the man who began their destruction was a suburban accountant called Jim Slater. To do it Slater awoke a force that had been dormant since before the war: the Stock Market. And as he grew powerful, Slater became an ally of politicians, but what neither he nor they realised was that the force he had awoken would overwhelm all of them. Adam Curtis, The Mayfair Set II: Entrepreneur Spelt S.P.I.V ***** BBC 1999
The stock market was something that frightened both the politicians and industrialists because it was unpredictable and threatened their control over the economy. Both lived with the terrible memory of the crash of 1929 and the unemployment it had caused. And as the boom continued to grow and excite the public interest, the Bank of England became worried. ibid.
He [Jim Slater] decided to try and work out a way of predicting which shares would go up and which would go down. ibid.
In 1964 Slater formed a company with a young Tory MP called Peter Walker. Slater-Walker was an investment company, and as the market continued to boom, Slater became rich managing other people’s money. ibid.
Jim Slater had discovered that the Coote family no longer had a majority shareholding [Cork Manufacturing]. And he decided to try and take the company over. He [Slater] made a hostile takeover. ibid.
He [Slater] immediately sold off large parts of the land and the factories: they were demolished for property development. Slater had invented a formula which he now repeated. The sales of assets from each takeaway were then used to fund the next and bigger one. ibid.
A group of takeover men grew up who began to break up the old paternalist world that had dominated British industry. The social centre for the takeover men was the Clermont Club, a gambling club in Berkeley Square in Mayfair. It was run by a right-wing aristocrat called John Aspinall; he was a ferocious professional gambler, and those he admired and let into his club were those he described as risk takers. ibid.
Goldsmith now became a close friend of Slater’s. Goldsmith’s specialised in targeting food companies. ibid.
To the establishment the Clermont set were a group of destructive gamblers. They were tearing up British industry and fuelling a dangerous boom in the stock market … ibid.
But Jim Slater was to stop being a despised outsider. Politicians were going to turn to him for help and make him an influential force in British politics. ibid.
In 1964 a Labour government had been elected. They came to power promising to create a modern prosperous Britain. But almost immediately they were faced with a crisis: the boom the Tories had begun five years before had gone out of control. British industry simply couldn’t cope with the demand created by the boom. A new government faced growing inflation and a balance of payments crisis. They had to cancel many of their election promises and cut spending. ibid.
What Slater argued was that he was using the stock market as a tool to reshape industry. He sold off any part of a company that didn’t make a healthy profit. What remained automatically became more efficient. And he pointed to his phenomenal growth in profits to prove this. ibid.
The Labour government copied Slater’s methods. Under Tony Benn’s guidance they masterminded massive takeovers and mergers in British industry. Old companies were forced together to make new conglomerates. Upper Clyde shipbuilders was created on Clydeside. And in the process, as with Slater’s takeovers, thousands of workers were sacked. It wasn’t just shipbuilding. Britain Leyland was formed by the forced merger of old car companies. ibid.
Slater and the other takeover men were not the saviours of industry they pretended to be. ibid.
The wave of takeovers created by the Labour government had little or no effect on productivity. The British economy stubbornly refused to grow. But the takeovers were having a hidden revolutionary effect on the structure of power in Britain. Both Slater and now the politicians were liquidating many of the assets of industry. They were feeding them as cash into an ever booming stock market. In future it would be the millions of small shareholders who would decide where that money would go. The market was now increasingly shaping the future of the economy, not the politicians. ibid.
Tiny Rowland now became a close friend of Jim Slater and the other takeover tycoons. They dined together at the Clermont and sold each other companies. All of these new tycoons were making fortunes by tearing up an old system of industrial power that had dominated Britain and its empire for over 100 years. ibid.