RUSH: Folks, I have to tell you something. It’s been somewhat gratifying, if I may explain. My lovely wife, Kathryn, had an observation last night, and some members of the staff today had a similar observation. She said, “You know, it’s uncanny. Here you are, you’re aware of for three days. You’re not here Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday. Where are you? You are getting treatment for stage 4 advanced lung cancer. You don’t even know if you’re gonna be feeling well enough to show up on Thursday or Friday. It turns out that you are. You show up on Thursday, you haven’t been there Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and you end up dominating the analysis of the big financial story of the week.”
And then one of the staff members here said, “In addition to that -” that’s a great compliment, by the way, and I am very grateful for it. But one of the staff members here said, “You know, you are your own best PR person.” And, you know, that’s true, but it’s a bummer, that in 30 years there isn’t anybody but me who can explain what I do. There’s nobody but me who can explain how I do it.
I remember when I first entertained the idea of hiring a PR firm, ’cause that’s what you did. So I went through the motions and I was interviewing these guys, various companies, and I noticed that every one of them said, “What you need to do, you need to call such-and-such at the New York Times and explain who you are and how you do what you do. And then you need to call the Washington Post.”
“Well, what are you gonna do?”
“I just did it. I’ve just advised you what you gotta do.”
I said, “Why do I have to make the call? Why do I have to call the New York Times? Why do I have to call the Washington Post? Why don’t you do it?”
“Well, you’re seeking our advice, you want to hire us as your PR firm. We’re telling you what you need to do.”
“So what you’re telling me is, I don’t need you. If you’re just gonna add to my workload, I don’t need you.” And so I’ve never had a PR firm. I’ve never had had an agent. I’ve never had, quote, unquote, representation, because there isn’t anybody out there who can explain what I do and how I do it, even after 31 years or however many it is. And it’s probably a good thing, all-in-all. I guess it’s one of the reasons why I’m still doing it and still unique after 31 years, that there’s not a soul out there that can explain what I’m doing.
And, I tell you what. This GameStop story, I’ll give you an example, there is a piece here by Frieda Powers at BizPacReview.com. And this story is basically nothing but quotes of what I said yesterday. The first paragraph explains what the story is and then every paragraph after that — well, the next four, five paragraphs, six paragraphs are what I said. They didn’t even try to rework it in their own words. And I need to thank Frieda Powers because I have never been this accurately quoted in this long a story that I can remember.
It’s uncanny. Normally in a story this long that quotes me they’re gonna get a bunch of things wrong. They’re gonna misinterpret, they’re gonna misanalyze, or they’re gonna misquote. This thing, none of that. It is accurate from beginning to end.
And then they quote me accurately, “Folks, it’s not just political now. The elites are bent out of shape that a bunch of average, ordinary users have figured out how to make themselves billionaires.” And that quote shows up all over cable news last night and this morning.
Now, what’s the latest on this? Well, it all depends on how deeply you want to go. I was watching Charles Payne today. Charles Payne goes back and forth between the Fox Business Network and the Fox News network. And I think I saw him being interviewed by Bill Hemmer. I think it was on Fox News. And he was talking about, as an example, the financial crisis in 2008.
Does everybody remember that? I mean, that’s 12 years ago now. That was a central, seminal event that led to the election of Barack Obama. Because you remember what McCain did. McCain canceled his campaign. And it wasn’t blazing any trails anyway. But McCain suspends his campaign to go back to Washington to monitor events. Suspend his campaign. The financial crisis is more important than his campaign. No. Your campaign is how you’re gonna fix this. But he suspended the campaign. And Obama didn’t. And Obama was left to own the issue.
And, of course, the financial crisis of 2008… When Charles Payne was discussing it today, he used it as one of the examples of why people today are so ticked off still at the elites in finance. Now, remember, what’s going on here in all this GameStop story from my standpoint is… I mean, the financial aspects of it are fascinating, and the idea that people can do this.
For example, the people that knew what they were doing in one day earned their kids’ college education — in one day. This has not been possible. Well, it’s been possible, but it’s not been as accessible as it is now. In one day, a lot of people trading in this stock were able to earn enough money to pay their kids’ college education, four years, in one day.
Which will lead me to further analysis of this here in just a second. But Charles Payne was talking about how people with memories of the financial crisis in 2008 — and he was right about this. He said (summarized), “The reason why there’s still a lot of noses bent out of joint, is if you go back to the financial crisis in 2008, the people who got us in trouble are the people who got the bailout money,” and everybody knew it.
The big banks who overextended on the subprime mortgage crisis, who had continued to underwrite worthless paper. The subprime mortgage crisis was the foundational, not building block, but it was the foundational cause for the 2008 financial crisis, and these banks — substitute “hedge funds” in the GameStop story. The banks in 2008 were gonna be wiped out, and so the treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, went in there.
He gathered them all in a room at 3 o’clock one afternoon and told them what they’re gonna have to do if they want the bailout money, and they got their bailout money. The people that caused the problem, who got us in trouble, are the same people that got the bailout money — and Americans knew it and recognized it and were livid about it.
It was one of the things that led to the creation, the organic creation of the Tea Party two years later in 2010, along with Obama and his stimulus plan and Obamacare. And the continuing slap in the face it was that Washington continued to make sure that the people who think they’re smarter than everybody else got in trouble because they’re not smarter than anybody else or everybody else. But they are in the establishment.
They are in the elites, the deep state, whatever you want to call ’em, and they got bailed out, and people remembered it. But these people at GameStop and Robinhood and all the Reddit users, they’re too young to remember. They might remember it. They’re Millennials now. They’d probably be around 30. So they might remember.
They might be old enough depending on their parents. Their parents might have been running around talking about how unfair it was and how rigged the game was. But it remains a big reason why people are mad. It remains a big reason why, when you explain to people what the GameStop story is really all about, it resonates.
It’s why when you explain that it’s nothing more than the same kind of elite behavior in politics where if you don’t agree with them, you’re gonna be shut up — you’re gonna be relegated to insignificance and irrelevance. The same thing’s gonna happen to you. You’re gonna assume you’re not smart enough to do the right thing with your money by people who think they’re smarter than you who actually aren’t.
So this is an area where there’s been a pent-up frustration, and it was just one of the many things that led to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. It’s not a mystery at all why Trump was elected. But I’m gonna tell you at the same time, these people were not… It just wasn’t gonna happen. Trump was not gonna win in 2020. No matter what, it wasn’t gonna happen.
No matter what.
They spent four years with this phony hoax and this coup attempt. Four years. It didn’t matter. They didn’t care whatever it took. He was not going to get reelected, and now that he has not been reelected, what are they doing? They are reversing everything he did. They are tearing down the wall at the border and building a wall around the United States Capitol.
Have you heard that? They’re building a restraining wall around the U.S. Capitol like there is around the White House, but they’re tearing down the wall at the U.S. border. What’s the message? The message is that illegal immigrants are far safer, far more dependable, far less of a threat to our country and to our culture, to our society than conservative right-wingers and Republicans are.
We need a wall bit around the Capitol to keep them away from their own government’s number one building. So on the GameStop story, folks, there are still so many layers to this. One thing to keep in mind is Robinhood and the other brokerage platforms decided to allow traders to buy GameStop again on their platforms today when they opened. They stopped trading of shares yesterday.
Well, they really only prevented buy orders. Selling of the stock was still permitted because that drives the shares down and helps save their hedge fund buddies, which is what this story became: How to bail out and save their hedge fund friends, just like bailing out the banks in 2008 was the number one objective.
So in some cases, Robinhood forcibly sold GameStop shares owned by account holders to drive the share price down even lower. Now, Robinhood and other firms are gonna try to save face today, and it’s already underway. They claim that they halted buying because it was unprecedented and they needed to make sure that they were able to handle the sort of volume.
Meaning they had to make sure they had enough capital on hand to handle whatever was gonna happen. But now they’re back open, and they are here to serve the little guy again. The little guy is winning again in this story. Now, all they needed to do was to stop buy orders for just one day. That would cause the stock to plummet, which is what their hedge fund buddies wanted to happen in the first place.
So what’s basically taken place overnight — and this is where the layers get deep, and I’m not gonna explain to you how.
So the market opened today. The price of GameStop goes up; the hedge funds won’t get hurt — or at least not as much — because they got out of their short positions. The machinations were taken overnight to allow them to extricate themselves from their short positions, and so the Robinhood app and other brokers may have saved Wall Street and screwed Main Street today.
We’ll just have to wait and see how it plays out, and if that is what happens, it’s because pressure was brought to bear. Think of Robinhood as Trump in a way. Sort of, not totally, but think of Robinhood and these other apps as Trump or MAGA under deep pressure from the elites and threats and so forth — and so that’s basically where we are.
But there’s another way to look at this that I want to share with you when we get back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: So wherever the GameStop story ends up, what it is (and the way it should be seen) is as the ultimate illustration — and you might even go so far as to say endorsement — of the free enterprise conservatism over liberalism or progressivism, and let me explain why. The guys on Reddit who did all of this — the “normalish people,” as they were referred to in the Drive-By Tech Media.
The tech media is part of the media elites as well, folks. My little tech bloggers, they think that they are special and smarter than everybody else. They fashion themselves as being part of the elites, and they’re referring to these Reddit guys as “normalish people.” They talk about people in terms like this: Normal people, special people, elites.
So these normal people on Reddit, they saw an imbalance, an inequity in the market. Hedge funds were selling a stock they didn’t own. Now, this is key. This is what short selling is in addition to everything else. It’s selling a stock you don’t even own. In this instance, their objective was to drive the price down. They were perfectly willing to destroy this company and then reap a profit at the same time because of their own actions.
None of what they were going to get rich off of was of any innate value of the company underlying the stock. The company involved, GameStop, was actually immaterial. They just saw a target that if they could short sell and drive its value down and be the reason the value went down, then they could score amazing, billion-dollar profits. Folks, they were literally making their own weather. This is how hedge funds have been making money for a long time.
Not only this way, but you pick out a company, and you drive its price down. You sell short. You’re not brilliant. You’re not seeing a company with incredible growth value and trying to get on that gravy train. No! You’re trying to manufacture a market event by creating a company that is going to lose its value because you are gonna make that happen. And that’s why you’re smarter than everybody else. And these guys at Reddit saw what was happening and saw an opportunity to thwart the smartest guys in the room.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Looky here. Maxine Waters has announced that she’s gonna have hearings on GameStop. She gonna investigate the GameStop scandal. She gonna rein in the corrupt practices of hedge funds. It will never happen, folks. She doesn’t even know what they do. Maxine Waters — do you think she can explain to you what a hedge fund does? Do you think she could explain why a hedge fund is different than a brokerage? But she gonna investigate ’em.
Now, don’t forget. Her husband is named Sidney. Sidney used to play for the Oakland Raiders. And he was a banker. Yeah, Sidney, her husband, got bailout money during the TARP business his bank was never entitled to, that no similar bank got, all because he was Mr. Maxine Waters. “Hedge funds have a long history of predatory conduct, and that conduct’s entirely indefensible,” said Maxine Waters.
Here’s this, speaking of the swamp, Janet Yellin, who is the Treasury secretary in the Biden administration, received $810,000 in speaking fees from the hedge funds that bailed out one of the primary losers in the GameStop story. Her financial disclosure forms showed that she made $337,500 for multiple days in October 2020 from Citadel. She also made $292,000 in October of 2019 and $180,000 in December of 2019. The Senate confirmed Yellin on Monday — she’s the first female secretary of the Treasury — and Jennifer Psaki, the White House press secretary, was asked if Yellin is gonna recuse herself from any investigation involving GameStop, and Psaki dodged the question.
It was a Reuters infobabe who asked Psaki if Yellin’s connection to Robinhood would cause her to have to recuse herself from the administration’s response to all this. Psaki said, “Obviously, we have a broad economic team. The SEC put out a statement yesterday.” No, she probably won’t have to have her recuse herself. Yet she was paid off $800,000 from one of the hedge funds in the GameStop scandal. Just amazing.
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