The stock market wars: U.S. lawmaker Ocasio-Cortez breaks it down

Citadel Income Fund

29/01/2021 20:27

By Makini Brice
    WASHINGTON, Jan 29 (Reuters) - A chat with U.S. Democratic
lawmaker Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez drew more than a million
viewers overnight to a website best-known for video game
players, where she dissected this week's headline-grabbing
battle between Reddit online traders and hedge funds.
    A champion of the progressive left, the 31-year-old New
Yorker in the U.S. House of Representatives hosted a talk on
Twitch https://www.twitch.tv/videos/892140641 about
short-selling, lobbying dollars and a hot stock: GameStop
Corp GME.N .
    "For so many people at home that are seeing this happen,
people were really feeling like everyday people were finally
able to proactively organize and get back at the folks that have
historically had all the marbles on Wall Street and forced one
hedge fund into an existential crisis," said the lawmaker, known
as "AOC."
    A member of the House's powerful Financial Services
committee, Ocasio-Cortez has a Twitch channel with one million
followers and promoted the Thursday broadcast to her 12 million
followers on Twitter. 
    GameStop, a video game retailer with 5,000 branches, has
become the face of a showdown between an army of retail
investors who have bought shares of the stock and sent it
sky-rocketing, and wealthy Wall Street hedge funds who bet
shares of the stock would fall, and are being squeezed.
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    Ocasio-Cortez hosted Alexis Goldstein, a former Wall Street
employee who now pushes for financial reform; Alexis Ohanian,
the co-founder of Reddit (and husband of tennis star Serena
Williams' husband); and video blogger The Stock Guy. They
discussed the intricacies of option trading and the complicated
role hedge funds play in markets. 
    The U.S. government has struggled to educate the general
public about the risks of stock trading. On Friday the White
House referred questions about whose responsibility that was to
the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has scolded
investors over the GameStop developments.  urn:newsml:reuters.com:*:nL4N2K432U
    Many Americans have lingering resentment from the 2007-2009
global financial crisis, which caused millions of people to lose
their jobs and their homes, Ocasio-Cortez said.
    "A little over 10 years ago, all of us got screwed, frankly,
in the recession, and so much of this moment too is that we
never saw a single person who was responsible ... we didn't see
anyone go to jail for that," she said.

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GameStop's rally cools as U.S. regulators eye wild trading   
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 (Reporting by Makini Brice; Editing by Heather Timmons and
Howard Goller)
 ((M.Brice@thomsonreuters.com;))