The apes are having fun and games on Wall Street, but it’s not the officially approved fun and games, like naked short selling. From Matt Taibbi at taibbi.substack.com:
The much-publicized war over “meme stocks” drags a longstanding Wall Street ripoff out of the shadows, to hilarious results
On CNBC’s Fast Money last week, anchor Melissa Lee appeared to mention the unmentionable. She was talking with Tim Seymour, CEO of Seymour Asset Management, who made offhand mention of the hedge funds shorting now-infamous stocks like AMC and GameStop. “Look, there are a lot of short sellers out there who have been borrowing stock they didn’t have,” Seymour said.
“Naked shorts, yeah,” said Lee.
You could almost hear a reverse record-scratch over the airwaves. Did a CNBC anchor really say that out loud?
The clip went viral. YouTube exploded with videos with titles like, “CNBC Just ADMITTED Naked Shorts On AMC!” and “CNBC just revealed GME and AMC are illegally naked short sold!” The frolicsome community of retail investors and activists who call themselves “Apes” and hang out in online forums like r/Superstonk and r/wallstreetbets, and who’ve placed the battle over the prices of stocks like AMC and GameStop at the center of one of the more interesting American culture-war developments in decades, rejoiced as one. Here was a representative of CNBC, a frontline agent of the financial establishment, admitting that the hedge funds they’re fighting have been cheating!
