WASHINGTON (MaceNews) – The following is Tuesday’s status check of developments in the U.S. that can influence economic, health and political outcomes:
• So much grief abroad in the land as dad comes home and the true meaning of “custodial account” becomes dinner table conversation. Discussion. Argument. Finally dad loses it. For a 13-year old who last week was $800 ahead and tonight is $11,000 in the red, it’s a learning experience. For dad too. Even for Dave Portnoy, who tweeted today he lost $700,000 as he sold all his “meme” stocks. And, he said, it’s all Vlad’s fault. The meme-stock guru and so many thousands of others who are getting post-high school financial literacy courses can blame Vlad – Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev – all they want. A lot of people are blaming Vlad for not being better prepared for that liquidity drain, for being forced, he says, to cut back share buying.
• So Vlad has returned to Twitter and he blames the system, the Wall Street settlement delay of several days, that is – pledging to work toward “real-time settlement.” Market vets wish him good luck on that. Might be a little expensive. Nevertheless for the survivors, teachable moments are incredibly valuable. Vlad may be getting some new advisers in his privately held cash-for-trade machine now that he’s benefited from outsiders’ billions.
• Now let’s widen the aperture a bit. While the American education system isn’t big on financial literacy, it still pushes the study of history to some large if diminishing extent. So how many times have eyes glazed over reading phrases like, “With the Reformation, the face of Europe was warped by intense religious and political conflict … .” In a couple hundred years students may hear their schooling implants telling them that, “With the sudden spread of electronic-speed communications, from the invention of the telegraph to something that was called Facebook, 21st century citizens found themselves at each others’ throats, their views of the world narrowcasted into divisive self-reinforcing confusion … .” There might be a sprinkling of archaic words. Whigs. Federalists. Republicans. Democrats.
• Time moves on. People learn. And again, for the survivors teachable moments can be valuable and even liberating. It only took a few days for gravity to unravel the #GME and #AMC shares, for silver to do what it always seems to do, return to earth. The chatter about uranium, after all, went nowhere as Robinhooders found it doesn’t trade on exchanges. And so it is with the market for truth. It has an inherent value as human beings have learned through the millennia. Some of Vlad’s ancestors may have found those sandstone spearpoints were easy to make but they just didn’t hold up, despite what they had been told. The coronavirus wasn’t a hoax after all. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s pair of jaw-dropping criticisms, first of Donald Trump’s provocations and then of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “loony” fever dreams weren’t so surprising because they were false, but because they were true. Gravity’s pull can be hard to source exactly but it is relentless. And so are facts. GameStop shares and “Stop the Steal” declarations have a certain vulnerability to gravity, to the Mitch McConnell gravitons that challenge the momentum, trip up the surge, eventually sap the staying power of things that have no anti-gravity magic about them after all.
• That’s not to say the process is smooth and inexorable. Sometimes you lose your head, like Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell when someone else controls the narrative, at least temporarily. In the markets as in life at large “temporarily” can last longer than your bank account or oxygen supply. People face the eternal quandary, do I stand up for truth now at some risk or hope it all dies down so we can forget about it? All that is at stake is the direction of things, which fork in the road leads to the next and the next, all accumulating into the shape of things decades from now.
• Seven days until the Senate trial of Donald Trump begins. Many of the jurors, perhaps every one of them, may have already made up their minds. They may not have to burden themselves with weighing the defense arguments, among which was one filed with the Senate Tuesday: “Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th President’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false,” the brief says. The president’s statements, mere words. Sticks and stones and so forth. And beginning at 9:30 p.m. EST on this Tuesday night, a policeman can be visited – in the Capitol Rotunda.
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Contact this writer: denny@macenews.com.
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