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Comment by gonzo41 | Hacker News Reader

Gotta say I agree, after hearing non crap news for a year. It's nice to see a hedge fund eat their hat.

I think the sentiment will shift when people realize that some of these hedge funds invested people's pension money, or university endowments, or any other number of people's funds. WSB has promoted a cartoonish version of Wall Street where hedge funds only hold rich, evil people's money. That's not really how this works.

A lot of people are also going to be disappointed to learn that some Wall Street firms profited massively from this situation.

And finally, a lot of retail investors who were late to the party are going to lose a lot of money on this. Some of that will flow to early Redditors who got their exit timing right. Some of that will flow to hedge funds who cleverly scooped up the naive money in the chaos.

I'd go so far as to bet that journalists are already working on articles with all of these angles. They'll start to trickle out just as soon as the market euphoria wanes.

"Pensions and university endowments" are the "women and children" of the financial world. Everyone constantly harps on these classes of people in order to play to your emotions instead of thinking logically. The great thing about America is we allow you to make "stupid" choices. No one should care if you lose all your money by acting stupidly, doesn't matter if you're Harvard or a heroin addict. If you rely on a pension or university endowment for funding you should take up a greater interest in where that money is being invested.

I hate this sentiment so much. As if it's a bad thing that Wall Street gangster hedge funds are finally feeling the squeeze that they put on everyday working people, just because some of the money they control is pension money or university endowments. It's literally the same rationale people use to justify staying in abusive relationships. Controlling some crumbs of the great unwashed's money gives these billionaires zero moral authority to do the crap they get away with every single day. Fuck them, then fuck them again. They deserve every ounce of this and then some.

> As if it's a bad thing that Wall Street gangster hedge funds are finally feeling the squeeze

It's categorically false to suggest that Wall Street hedge funds are all suffering from this.

Some of them are making massive amounts of money on this situation. Some of that money comes at the expense of casual investors.

This idea that Redditors are siphoning money out of hedge funds is just not true for the last round of GME investors. In fact, those latest investors will probably end up funneling their losses right into hedge funds who short this on the way back down.

> when people realize that some of these hedge funds invested people's pension money, or university endowments, or any other number of people's funds.

What if, rather than make the sentiment shift in the direction you think it's going, it actually makes people more upset for hedge funds gambling away main street's money irresponsibly? It's almost as if those who treat other people's money as a casino shouldn't get sympathy from those other people.

The financial institutions will be fine. Meanwhile some unsophisticated investors who saw this as the financial opportunity of a lifetime will lose their shirts and their homes.

Until it cascades like Lehman and AIG with USA citizens holding the bag. In two days we are 33,333 days since the crash of 1929.

This is nothing like the size of the bubble (US housing market) that precipitated those crashes.

It is actually. The housing market had real collateral even if it was overly appraised.

No, it's not. Not even close.

The current market cap of GME is $25 billion. Meanwhile, the size of the subprime mortgage market in 2008 was in the neighborhood of $50 trillion.

Shorting losses can be infinite. Then add in the derivatives at play. Who backs these trades? Who backs them? What gets triggered when any of these default on their contracts?

The bubble may become more visible if a chain reaction is started.

If that is possible here, there needs to be more regulation on hedge funds so they do not operate in a "heads I win, tails the US govt. bails me out" scenario.

The solution is simple, do not bail them out.

That's the most hilarious part of it. It's a given that someone is going bankrupt big time and someone is going to want to be made whole. They will threaten the stock market until the USG bails them out.

https://twitter.com/PigeonsK/status/1354824493982773249

Argument for cascading.

The assumptions in that 4chan screenshot are putting in a lot of work.

Who backs each party isn't that hard to verify. The only assumption is the copy cat trading of Melvin's strategy which seems fairly safe to make.

Well, one assumption is that the exposure is actually a meaningful number to an investment bank.

Cascading already happened last March and the Fed bailed out the market. That backstopping has clearly helped buoy the market to new highs, while the real economy is contracting.

Something like this could trigger a cascade, but that cascade would rest solely on the people who built this bubble.

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