BREAKDOWN: WallStreetBets Is Occupy Wall Street With Teeth
CoinDesk Podcast Network
CoinDesk
4.8 • 689 Ratings
🗓️ 28 January 2021
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The retail trader insurgency has massive implications for the future of capital markets.
This episode is sponsored by Nexo.io.
This week, a collective of foul-mouthed internet memers took down some of Wall Street’s best-known hedge funds. In today’s episode, NLW looks at:
- The historical context of how the Great Financial Crisis set the stage for WallStreetBets
- How WSB gained infamy during the COVID-19 crisis by correctly predicting the market’s rebound while other investors remained bearish
- Why WSB started going after short-sellers, particularly around GameStop (GME)
- How WSB forced a short squeeze that required Melvin Capital to call in nearly $3B of emergency capital
- Why Robinhood forcing users to stop buying GameStop and other related assets will go down as an inflection point in the history of capital markets
-
Earn up to 12% APY on Bitcoin, Ethereum, USD, EUR, GBP, Stablecoins & more. Get started at nexo.io.
-
Image credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images News and WallStreetBets Subreddit
See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | One of the standard responses of those in power has been to point to the stock market as a rejoinder. |
| 0:06.1 | Stocks are going up, therefore the economy is good. |
| 0:09.3 | Never mind that houses, college, and basically everything else that you would want to buy to get a better life and a better place in society, are getting more expensive. |
| 0:17.4 | When the powers that be kept telling people that stocks going up means the economy is doing well, |
| 0:22.9 | is it any wonder that people started to use stocks to try to get ahead? |
| 0:28.7 | Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW. |
| 0:32.8 | It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and and the Big Picture Power Shifts remaking our world. |
| 0:39.6 | The breakdown is sponsored by nexo.io and produced and distributed by CoinDesk. |
| 0:46.2 | What's going on, guys? It is Thursday, January 28th, and today you know we're talking about Wall Street bets. |
| 0:56.8 | In the year that I've been doing this show, |
| 1:04.4 | I don't think there has ever been one as important as today's. I know for a fact that I won't be able to cover every dimension of this story on this podcast alone, and I would say it's a |
| 1:09.3 | pretty safe bet that this is going to spill into |
| 1:11.8 | tomorrow's and probably Saturday's show as well. The mission of this show today is to convince |
| 1:18.5 | you that this is not a story about the specific valuation of some stock or even set of stocks. |
| 1:25.3 | It isn't even only a story about market strategies between naked |
| 1:29.3 | short selling and short squeezes, nor is it solely about the bigger narrative of retail versus |
| 1:34.2 | institutional investors. This is a story about power. In other words, who has the power to shape |
| 1:41.4 | the economies that shape our lives and how people are trying to take |
| 1:44.8 | some of that power back. This is a story about aspiration, about people wanting something more |
| 1:50.2 | than survival and feeling increasingly desperate to get it. This is a story about structural |
| 1:54.9 | fault lines, about the inevitable consequences of decisions that were made more than a decade ago |
| 2:00.4 | and shape everything |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from CoinDesk, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of CoinDesk and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.