The Very Few vs The Many (Rigged Markets) - Occupy 2021

[kelley]

Was industrial genocide transgressive enough for you? Because it was certainly transformative, and the world had never seen anything like it once undertaken.

[dada]

I guess I meant transgressive in the sense of outside of class society. What challenges the boundaries of acceptability by simply existing. The transgressive society is an affront to class society by continuing to be. It isn't part of history, since history itself is the history of class society. So a presence with no historical force. Working for the total transformation of class society into something resembling a human society.

[kelley]

"Working for the total transformation of class society into something resembling a human society."

This is more or less the history of the twentieth century.

Seeing the transformation take place will depend upon whether or not you believe modernity is an unfinished project, and what might be brought along to help complete the tasks noted.

Every blank slate is anything but.

[dada]

"This is more or less the history of the twentieth century."

I see it rather as eruptions of the transgressive, into history. In history, we see traces of it. History permits only what it can appropriate. It has been going on for centuries.

I see modernity as an unfinished project, but in the sense of an unfinished manuscript sitting in a drawer. The writer is now firmly in the sway of the postmodern muse. The inspiration isn't to break the fourth wall and speak directly to the audience, but to walk right through it.

[dada]

From the historical point of view, the transgressive society is a society of degenerates, pushing the boundaries of acceptability is making what was once unacceptable, now acceptable. For the transgressive, pushing the boundaries of acceptability is making what was once acceptable, now unacceptable. Racism, class exploitation and discrimination, social inequality.

[dada]

The transgressive attacks war by cutting its ideological supply chains. Not the material, but materialist culture. You know, say everybody suddenly stopped ordering on Amazon tomorrow. Amazon would die. Another corporation would take its place. Sahara, maybe.

Not the consumers, but the empty life, feeding the bottomless pit of consumer obsession, its spirits wasted by consumption.

[dada]

History portrays the transgressive character as sad and alone, but if you chance to meet one, you'll find that is rarely the case. They're happy most often, and found in good company. And you'll notice that when you're happy, even alone is in good company.

[Belligerent Savant]

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https://realinvestmentadvice.com/david- ... d-as-hell/

A few noteworthy points raised here.

...

Roots Of Anger

It is not hard to understand some of the sources of anger. Perhaps one of the most revealing single indicators is the variance in wealth distribution over time. In the 1990s, when Baby Boomers were in their late 30s, just slightly older than Millennials’ age in 2020, they owned seven times the share of household wealth (21% vs. 3%). The opportunities for income and wealth accumulation were massively more significant for Baby Boomers than for Millennials.



Missing The Target

As a result, it isn’t too surprising to observe a fair amount of discontent directed at the Baby Boom generation, and it is clear from a number of the Reddit/wallstreetbets threads that this is happening. Further, any reader of The Fourth Turning by William Strauss and Neil Howe can come away with plenty of material for younger generations to incriminate the Baby Boom generation.

For example, Baby Boomers in the US grew up in an environment of enormous economic growth in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. Yet, those prodigious benefits seemed not to be enough; massive debts got used to boost consumption even further. From a historical perspective (and to younger generations), Baby Boomers’ generation appears rapacious in its consumption, like locusts stripping the country bare.

A Generalization

Of course, such a view is a generalization that belies the existence of countless individual Baby Boomers who act and behave in ways that are utterly antithetical to that characterization. It is not hard to find smart and talented individuals and are generous with their time, financial support, knowledge, and experience. As a result, it is hard to consider the entire generation of Baby Boomers an appropriate target of opprobrium.

There are other targets. For instance, short-sellers have received a great deal of anger following the Gamestop and Robinhood episode. Such too appears unjustified. For one, there are at least two sides to every story, and it is essential to hear both to get closer to the truth. Besides, given the upward bias of stocks, short-sellers must work even harder to make a living. Some of the most accomplished (and humble and generous) investors are short-sellers.

As a result, the targeting of outrage against groups such as Baby Boomers or short sellers is at best misguided. At worst, such efforts are both malicious and counterproductive. It only makes things worse by directing outrage in a general direction, including people sympathetic to the cause.

A Bad Game

Where should anger be directed then? Ben Hunt guides us to a better understanding by completely flipping the perspective. It is not a whodunit where the perpetrator needs catching. Instead, the problem is the economic, political, and financial system has become a destructive “game” for most participants. In other words, the odds stacked against us are such that there is little chance of success over time, regardless of performance.

To see this, we need to reconsider our assumptions and mental models. In his piece, “Hunger Games,” Hunt explains how things have changed in the markets:

“You have been told that you can be a PARTICIPANT in the game of markets, that you can storm the playing field of companies, that you can take matters into your own hands and rescue a promising company under unfair attack.”

In a world of entirely free markets, strong property protection, effective regulation, effective enforcement, and a level playing field, this might be true, as the Robinhood episode revealed. However, many of these assumptions are no longer valid:

“We all saw that the thing that determines whether or not our stock market bets pay off is … other bets. We all saw that there is no ‘game of companies’ taking place independently of our bets. We all saw that our bets, in and of themselves, can win the ‘game’, with absolutely zero input from the ‘team’ that is supposedly out on the ‘field’.”

Such is a very different concept of markets than what most of us have operated on. It boils down to two straightforward tenets:

“Everyone knows that everyone knows that 1) The bets ARE the market. 2) Market makers OWN the market.”

Implications

The implications of this are huge. Success in investing in this context is not about researching and applying analytical skills and hanging in when it gets tough. Nope.

Being an investor today is more like being a gladiator. You might win some fights, even in glorious fashion, but the odds currently stacked against your long-term survival. You are mainly just an actor in a game designed to serve the ends of a select few.

“Both of these stories are narratives for our very own Hunger Game, a spectacle that chews up the participants in the arena while delivering enormous profits to the networks (media, financial and political) that put them on.”

The notion of participants getting chewed up in a contest that deliver enormous profits to others does seem to capture much of the environment – and therefore explains much of the anger if it feels like it’s not a fair game that’s because it isn’t.

Another Theory

Interestingly, Noam Chomsky’s presentation, Requiem for the American Dream, dovetails nicely with Hunt’s characterization of the higher-level structure of the social, political, and financial environment. According to Chomsky, the concentration of wealth and power is more than just an unpleasant outcome; instead, it is a distinct objective of the super-rich.

As he explains, the 1960s was an era of much greater wealth equality and was the backdrop for a substantial expansion of civil liberties. Increasingly too, young people were protesting against the government, against corporate leadership, against AUTHORITY, and it scared people in charge.

Principles

As Chomsky tells it, “The 10 Principles Of Concentration Of Wealth & Power” (the subtitle of the presentation) were something of playbook devised by the super-rich to stem the tide of egalitarianism and to reverse it. While this hypothesis certainly rings with conspiratorial tones, the “principles” sure explain many things.

One set of principles prescribes reshaping the economy through financialization and offshoring. Together, these two efforts serve to increase the role of asset owners in the economy at the expense of reducing laborers’ role. Both have succeeded spectacularly.

Another principle is, “Marginalize the population.” Such gets accomplished by maintaining the veneer of democracy while at the same time eroding its power to be representative. Chomsky describes how most people do not have a voice that counts:

“In one study, together with another fine political scientist, Benjamin Page, [Martin] Gilens took about 1,700 policy decisions, and compared them with public attitudes and business interests. What they show, I think convincingly, is that policy is uncorrelated with public attitudes, and closely correlated with corporate interests. Elsewhere he showed that about 70 percent of the population has no influence on policy—they might as well be in some other country. And as you go up the income and wealth level, the impact on public policy is greater—the rich essentially get what they want.”

Hypothesis

Based on these principles, the hypothesis seems to fit pretty well, but principle #5, “Attack solidarity,” really stands out as having explanatory power. The idea that the potential of an extensive group of people to collaborate toward a common goal is a terrifying prospect for a small minority of super-rich people with different interests. The energy of the masses, however, also represents a force that can turn on itself:

“SOLIDARITY IS quite dangerous. From the point of view of the masters, you’re only supposed to care about yourself, not about other people. This is quite different from the people they claim are their heroes, like Adam Smith, who based his whole approach to the economy on the principle that sympathy is a fundamental human trait—but that has to be driven out of people’s heads. You’ve got to be for yourself and follow the vile maxim—“don’t care about others”—which is okay for the rich and powerful, but devastating for everyone else.”

...when people fall prey to the maxim “don’t care about others,” they inadvertently advance the super-rich’s goals by disrupting the solidarity of everyone else. More specifically, when someone puts huge bets on Gamestop to stick it to the short sellers and rages about the boomers, they aren’t soldiers bravely fighting for a better system. They are pawns getting played.

Requiem

Such may get mistaken for a passing phase or a transient cultural phenomenon, but it seems like there is something far more substantive here. Chomsky hints at it with his introduction:

“DURING THE Great Depression, which I’m old enough to remember, it was bad—much worse objectively than today. But there was a sense that we’ll get out of this somehow, an expectation that things were going to get better, ‘maybe we don’t have jobs today, but they’ll be coming back tomorrow, and we can work together to create a brighter future’.”

Such highlights the problem. In the Great Depression, things were terrible, but there was a belief that things would get better. There was hope. Today, most people are far better off in terms of health and wealth, but the idea is that things are getting worse. The hope has faded.

For the first time in the country’s history, a generation has lost hope of things getting better. They have lost the American Dream. In a culture that highly values growth and competition, the fate of having less is an especially tough pill to swallow. It’s enough to make people angry.

Actions

What can we do? Diagnosed as a conflict between the super-rich and everyone else, improving the situation will not be a battle to be won by a handful of brave “soldiers.” That effort will require broader participation and more collaboration. As a result, an excellent place to start is to stop attacking each other.

Beyond that, Hunt provides several high-level prescriptions. He recommends pressing for lower leverage in financial institutions at the policy level. He recommends focusing on real-world companies and cash flows at the investment level. At a personal level, he recommends “calling a thing by its proper name.” Collectively, he promotes efforts designed to “diminish Wall Street’s influence over our democracy.” Such is a useful framework from which to make plans.

[Elvis]

https://realinvestmentadvice.com/david- ... d-as-hell/

A few noteworthy points raised here.

This quote from Chomsky hits a nail on the head:

From the point of view of the masters, you’re only supposed to care about yourself, not about other people. This is quite different from the people they claim are their heroes, like Adam Smith, who based his whole approach to the economy on the principle that sympathy is a fundamental human trait—but that has to be driven out of people’s heads. You’ve got to be for yourself and follow the vile maxim—“don’t care about others”—which is okay for the rich and powerful, but devastating for everyone else.”

And this ending hits the right notes:

[...] Hunt provides several high-level prescriptions. He recommends pressing for lower leverage in financial institutions at the policy level. He recommends focusing on real-world companies and cash flows at the investment level. At a personal level, he recommends “calling a thing by its proper name.” Collectively, he promotes efforts designed to “diminish Wall Street’s influence over our democracy.” Such is a useful framework from which to make plans.

[dada]

"As Chomsky tells it, “The 10 Principles Of Concentration Of Wealth & Power” (the subtitle of the presentation) were something of playbook devised by the super-rich to stem the tide of egalitarianism and to reverse it. While this hypothesis certainly rings with conspiratorial tones, the “principles” sure explain many things."

Chomsky's analysis doesn't ring with conspiritorial tones, that's the way the summarizer here is spinning it. Chomsky is talking about class warfare, class discrimination.

[JackRiddler]

Someone asked me, "So how much money has been collectively lost so far on GME?"

Of course the answer is evident in the phrase zero-sum game, but I looked up the chart.

Feb 2016: 28.00
Feb 2020: 3.60 (low point under short-sell pressure)
Mid-Dec 2020: 13.85 (around when chance of short squeeze became widely known)
27 Jan: 347.50 !!! followed by plunge and return over next week, then new plunge...
Today, 13 Feb: 52.40

It may not be over, depending on how much short exposure there still is (since the shorts are forced to buy). Apparently completely insane-sounding $800 calls for Feb 26 have been sold. (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/implied- ... 01233.html)

Players large and small love ranges like this. Every dollar lost up or down also means an equivalent gain for someone else, minus brokerage fees. Also true of naked shorts, derivative bets, etc. So the collective gain-loss for all humans is about net zero.

Those who made the most no doubt include unsavory characters among the biggest and worst of Wall Street entities. No doubt many of the smallest and most hopeful gamblers were wiped out despite the rhetoric of rebellion and "hold the line." But the big guys winning and the little ones losing would be just like every other day on the market.

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[dada]

"The last bailout was unprecedented in scale. These corporations were kept viable in a period where, in a capitalist economy, they would’ve crashed. But we don’t have a capitalist economy — business wouldn’t accept that, and they have enough power to prevent it — so, therefore, the public comes in to pour literally trillions of dollars into the hands of failing corporations and maintain them. And that’s true in all sorts of ways. There’s one major technical study of bailouts over several years that concludes that probably 25 percent — a study of the hundred biggest corporations on the Fortune list by two well-known economists — 25 percent of them survived thanks to public subsidy at some point, and most of the rest gained from it. So while this is unprecedented in scale, there’s nothing new about it. The same is true after all financial crises."

Another quote from Chomsky's Requiem. We understand what is meant by institutional racism. This is institutional class inequality. There are two sets of rules for rich and poor. And we know this, yet still act surprised for some reason every time we notice it.

[Agent Orange Cooper]

[Elvis]

https://gimms.org.uk/wp-content/uploads ... y-Lens.pdf

The hyperinflation in Weimar Germany in 1922-23 has become the poster child of mainstream economists -and especially the monetarists- when presenting the benefits of constraining governments by the rules of ‘sound finance’.

https://medium.com/pegs-institute/the-h ... 53b13ddaee

Weimar had the obvious effects of a post-war nation burdened by demands for war reparations by three former combatants. It’s plain to see the devastating impact this wrought, with financial restrictions imposed on the nation and even direct control when France seized land as compensation for missed payments.

[Elvis]

Good take on the GameStop affair by Brett Scott, recently one of my favorite writers:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfr ... es-traders

The real lesson of the GameStop story is the power of the swarm
Brett Scott
Sat 30 Jan 2021

Rather than retreating from the company’s over-valued shares, traders have embraced them with nihilistic exuberance


When I worked in high finance it was a running joke that day traders – small retail traders – were like beetles sifting through the dung of the big funds that truly drove the markets. They are in a weak position, given their lack of capital and coordination, but an entire retail brokerage industry – nowadays exemplified by companies such as Robinhood – is designed to cultivate a myth of their heroic status.

That’s why the GameStop story stands out. In his book Liar’s Poker, former Wall Street trader Michael Lewis described powerful traders who work for big investment banks as “big swinging dicks”, but the folk appeal of the GameStop saga stems from the fact that a swarm of “little swinging dicks” have seemingly banded together to become a giant swinging dick, defying gravity to push the price of a stock far beyond its actual underlying value.

Stock traders are split into two camps. The first are detectives who study the actual company a share pertains to, a process called “fundamental analysis”. The second do “technical analysis”, which involves studying the actions of those doing fundamental analysis. Day traders are notoriously prone to technical analysis because they lack inside access to companies or teams of analysts, so are forced to huddle in forums discussing graphs representing the actions of other traders.

This is where much market surrealism emerges, because it turns out that all those graphs that technical traders watch also reflect the actions of other technical traders. If traders are watching traders who are watching traders, rather than watching the company, the market lapses into a twilight zone.

This has happened in the case of GameStop. The share price has almost entirely detached from the company, but – in a strange twist – everyone has become self-aware of that fact, and rather than backing away, have embraced it with nihilistic exuberance. The share price rising was a symbol of pure “irrationality” – everything economics textbooks say shouldn’t happen. This is why it seems so symbolic. But what is it symbolic of?

A popular current interpretation is that it’s a David-and-Goliath fight against hedge funds who have been betting on a fall in share price through “shorting”. Think of shorters as being like people who borrow tickets to a concert, then sell them at the door to people trying to get in, before telling everyone that the theatre is burning, then waiting outside to re-buy them at a fire-sale price from the fleeing punters, before returning them to the original owners and walking off with a profit.

In this case, shorters are “waiting at the theatre door” to buy GameStop shares that they shorted. Citron, the hedge fund that’s been caught up in the story, does fundamental analysis before shorting and loudly broadcasting the news to technical traders, hoping that they will bolt for the exit. Rather than doing that, however, the herd realised that Citron and many other short-sellers were waiting to re-buy shares, and instead of rushing for the exit to allow them to all cash out, backed away and barricaded themselves in the theatre, knowing the short-sellers would eventually have to rush “into the theatre” to re-buy, causing what’s called a short squeeze.

The GameStop version of this is interesting because it’s been meme-powered. The day traders have drawn upon the guild-like, tribal structures of the Reddit and gamer community to transform themselves into that “giant swinging dick”, standing against the mere big dicks of the hedge funds.

Dick metaphors are apt because day-trading has always been a realm of bros, and herein lies another possible interpretation of events. In the old days the retail brokerage industry almost exclusively drew on macho imagery to send male traders off to fight the markets, but some platforms at the centre of the GameStop story are a little different. Robinhood was one of the first “woke” trading apps geared towards millennials. It played into an emo version of the “bullshit jobs” narrative: your job is pointless. Stop working for the man and become the Man by seamlessly buying tiny slices of companies.

The last few years have produced a barrage of articles about populism powered by angry men who were promised things. Those narratives are normally metaphorical – no actual promising takes place – but when it comes to day-trading, they’re quite literal: the retail brokerage industry literally promises escape from the grind by telling men that they’re destined for market greatness.

That industry, though, is called “retail” for a reason: wholesale mega-players don’t want to deal with the little man. They rely on retail firms – such as spreadbetting firms – to pen the day traders into closed ecosystems where they can fight each other, while retail firms harvest them for fees and interest before laying off the residual risk into the actual markets.

If anything, GameStop could be a reaction against the zero-sum futility of day-trading. Far from saving you from bullshit jobs, trading is a bullshit job, and the only way to temporarily win at it is not to throw yourself into battle against “the market”. It’s to collaborate in swarms.