Are you getting sold short?

Dear Friend,

Whether you’re a day trader or an idle spectator, by now you have heard about Reddit, GameStop, BlackBerry, Robinhood, hedge funds, short selling, and the inflating of circa-1990s stocks “for fun and profit,” as The New Republic’s Kate Aronoff put it. While everyone was hyperventilating, TNR was putting the sordid affair in context, analyzing its impact on politics, economics, media, and the environment.

Writing in TNR’s economics section, aptly named Sold/Short, Jacob Silverman saw the bright side of the GameStop fiasco: “It’s calling attention to the blatant absurdities of casino capitalism.” He also listed a few remedies: “Transaction taxes, … continue to investigate Robinhood and its backroom dealings with hedge funds, … introduce limits on short selling so that these kinds of short squeezes don’t happen again.”

Staff writer Kate Aronoff, writing in our environment section, Apocalypse Now, exposed “the stock market as the reckless game it frequently is—made all the more reckless by decades of deregulation,” adding that, for years, “economists have described climate change as a market failure. The costs of polluting, they have argued, are not being properly accounted for in the final price of a product like coal or oil.”

Media staff writer Alex Shephard saw that the coverage itself was “revealing—not just about how the stock market works, but also about how financial media works.… Networks like CNBC and Fox Business are in league with the hedge funds they supposedly cover.” The New Republic is often the go-to destination when events need background. You can try our brand of independent journalism with three months of unlimited digital access for just $5.

At the intersection of economics and politics, Silverman reminds readers: “Right-wing lawmakers—including the Trump family and its political allies—have benefited from generous rules covering everything from insider trading for senators to tax write-offs for real estate moguls.” But on this issue, Silverman notes, “Don Jr., generally a fan and beneficiary of rigged systems … found some strange fellow travelers … including anyone from the boorish Barstool Sports honcho Dave Portnoy to leftist stalwart Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.… It seems unlikely that the shared disgust over casino capitalism will lead to any bipartisan policy agreement, much less meaningful regulation of the financial institutions that created these conditions in the first place.”

If you believe that finance capitalism is largely at odds with democracy, read Kate Aronoff, Alex Shephard, Jacob Silverman, and their colleagues at TNR.

Subscribe to The New Republic today.

Sincerely,

Kerrie Gillis, publisher