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Jan. 31, 2021 - Epoch Times
42:33
GameStop Short Squeeze Explained—Jeff Carlson: Why Government Should Not Step In | American Thought Leaders
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Recently, small investors organized online to buy large amounts of GameStop stock and caused billions in losses to Wall Street hedge funds looking to short that stock and benefit from its declining price.
GameStop had been sinking for years.
But in January of this year, prices soared to over $300 a share.
On January 28, the online trading platform Robinhood suspended all GameStop buying activities, crashing the price.
Investors accused Robinhood of manipulating the market in favor of hedge funds, This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
And before we get into the interview, please sign up for our mailing list.
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Jeff Carlson, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Cheers.
Great.
Always glad to be on with you, Jan.
Thanks for having me.
Well, Jeff, I just outlined a little bit of what we've been seeing over the past days when it comes to GainStop and actually a few other stocks as well.
You have a really great op-ed on the Epoch Times right now talking about what you see happening in the broader context.
Why don't we start, though, with what actually is going on here?
Well, you know, this is something the story here actually started some time ago.
When, you know, some investors began looking and stumbled across a very unique situation.
And GameStop was a company that actually, although it was struggling operationally, balance sheet-wise, it was fine.
A lot of cash on the books, no upcoming liquidity hurdles that it wasn't going to be able to get past.
So, in other words, a company that was kind of struggling to deal with a declining end market But didn't have anything that was any sort of trigger that appeared like it was going to push them into bankruptcy or cause them to be pushed into bankruptcy.
And at the same time, there was a massive amount of short interest that was embedded in the stock.
And so as some of these investors began, these potential investors began to look at the situation, they realized that it could pose a really intriguing and kind of very unique place to invest.
And that is that They could be in a company that wasn't imminently going to default and might be subject to a short squeeze as they started to buy shares if they could move the share price up, given that there was just a massive amount of short interest.
So much so that it exceeded the float of the shares, which is, while it happens, is very, very unusual.
So stepping back a year, it was kind of a unique situation.
Now, all of this finally kind of came to our attention only because the stock finally began to move.
You know, really, December, the beginning of this year, you know, where it was trading at $6, I think just a couple months ago, and then up into the teens and the 20s.
And of course, over the last couple weeks, in the last week in particular, I think it hit a high of maybe top ticked around $400, but, you know, between $250, $350.
There's been a resulting immense short squeeze that has come at the expense of the hedge funds.
And, you know, what makes this such an interesting story is that part of what's happening here is that it's the hedge funds that usually, you know, do the squeezing are the ones being squeezed by retail individual investors.
So it's not only a unique investment situation, but it's also a unique situation in terms of the players and how they're positioned here.
Well, and for starters, let's get some terms out of the way.
You mentioned a number of things right at the beginning.
For a starter, you described something called short interest.
Why don't you tell me what short interest means and also, you know, frankly, how shorting actually works?
Yeah, I mean, you know, the situation here is that there was a number of hedge funds that wanted to short this stock.
And what that means is you typically borrow shares of the stock, you then sell them, And what you're really doing is you're making a bet that the price of these shares is going to go lower.
And you'll be able to buy them back at a lower point in a future point in time and return those shares and capture the differential.
So short selling is basically placing a bet that a stock is going to be undergoing a downward movement at a future point in time.
And, you know, there's a wide variety of opinions on short selling.
But I guess from my perspective, fundamentally, there's nothing wrong with short selling per se.
It can help add liquidity to the market and it can help bring a market into balance when astute investors realize that a company or an industry, think back to 2008 with the banking sector, is fundamentally overvalued and short selling draws attention to that and can help adjust prices accordingly.
You know, and it can also be used aggressively.
And in this situation, this is a situation where the use of short selling was very, very different than normal.
And part of that is the fact that the short selling exceeded the float, which is, think about it as the tradable shares of a company.
The short selling exceeded the float of the company itself.
So, in other words, more shares were actually effectively being shorted than were being existed and traded in the market.
And there's a few different ways this can happen, but one of the most obvious is what's called a naked short, and that is when you actually don't borrow the shares, you just simply short them.
And in this particular case, we had one very large hedge fund that established an enormous short position.
A couple others joined in, and we had a very unique situation where the short interest exceeded that of the outstanding shares of the company.
No, and that's kind of, you know, incredible to even hear about to the layperson because, you know, how can you borrow something or you're basically saying, I intend to borrow this, but you're not actually borrowing it and somehow someone allows you to do that and then be accountable for it.
Yeah, you know, and most of the, a lot of the times, say, naked short selling really isn't that bad because it's very easy to obtain shares to cover that short.
The problem here is that the supply, well, I'd say the demand for the shares outstrips the supply.
And so if a lot of people have engaged in naked shorting, the ability to go ahead and replace those shares suddenly becomes problematic.
And we've had this incredible move up in the underlying stock prices.
And this can be exacerbated with options.
And the use of options in this scenario.
And it also ties into the risk management that's taking place on the financial firm's side.
So, let's picture a scenario where the stock is trading at a level where it's out of the money relative to the options.
As the stock begins to move up in price and move towards that, well, those options are also going to move sequentially higher in price.
And the further those options start out of the money, the greater the beta they can have, the greater the rate of change.
And as that happens, that causes sort of a risk reassessment that's required on the broker side of things.
And they may be required to go ahead and effectively buy more shares to balance their risk portfolio.
And it creates further demand for the shares and can just create a Kind of an upward cycle that can be known as a gamma squeeze.
Okay, that's super interesting and I want to talk about options in a moment because that's also something that's not necessarily completely obvious to every viewer.
Before I go there, the thing I'm really curious about is, given that this company had decent financials, it was a fully functional company even if it was a declining market, why would some of these hedge funds take these incredibly aggressive You know, positions, so to speak, on short selling the stock.
Well, you know, I mean, they're always looking for situations where they can try and push down a company.
And you've got a company that's in a retail sector.
You know, the whole entire way that the business is conducted is shifting to online.
So the outlook for the company is long term is pretty poor.
It's declining fundamentals.
The only thing that they had in their favor was there wasn't they had enough cash to kind of muddle along for a period of time and that's what these investors picked up on that there wouldn't be a near-term trigger that could cause a default now as this company shares have gone up it's also possible that they may be able to you know get incremental capital and find a way to shift their business online and kind of take advantage of this so You
know, one of the big miscalculations was getting involved in a company that actually did have cash on hand.
I've encountered these situations before, where a company's trading like it is imminently about to go bankrupt, but when you actually look at it closely, you can't find any reason.
There's enough cash on balance.
It doesn't look like they're going to trigger bank covenants, etc., in the near term.
So, you know, you start to realize that, hey, wait a minute, there's not necessarily anything that's going to imminently push them in to Chapter 11, even though The long-term scenario for the company looks very, very poor.
And that's kind of the environment that GameStop was operating in.
I can't tell you exactly why these guys selected GameStop.
I'm sure they did it along with a number of others, etc.
And sometimes what these guys like to do is go ahead and put real pressure on a company, drive the stock down, and see if they can get a technical violation with the bank covenant.
Maybe they miss a quarter or something and they can control the situation that way and engage with a company throughout management, what have you.
But regardless, this is a company whose long-term fundamentals are very, very poor, but they were in a unique position of having enough cash on the balance sheet where there was nothing that was actually going to thrust them into bankruptcy in the very short term.
Well, so let's go back to these options for a sec.
Again, so how do options actually work?
And how does this sort of exponential curve that you were describing earlier actually happen and contribute to the growth of the value of the stock?
Yeah, I mean, options effectively allow you to sort of express an opinion on a stock long term.
And there's both puts and calls.
And I guess maybe without getting too complicated on it, you can use an option to express an opinion that a stock is going to go higher or go lower.
And options really kind of originated out of the agricultural markets, where farmers wanted to have a known return on their crops when they began the planting season.
So a way to think about it for these farmers is they don't want to speculate on the price of corn.
Their business is growing corn.
So they would very often want to enter into a future contract where they could deliver their corn at a preset price.
And they would just know that this is what I'm going to make for the season, assuming I can grow my crop as I think.
And that's sort of the origin of options, where somebody says, okay, I'll be willing to buy your corn from you in six months' time down the road at a price of X. And that contract is entered into.
Now, the actual price of corn six months down the road could be wildly different.
It could be much higher, it could be much lower.
For the farmer, he set his price and he's removed the risk and he just gets a reasonable rate of return that he's happy with.
And that's kind of how it happened, how it kind of came into being.
On stocks, it's really the same thing.
You're buying the ability to buy or sell that stock at a price in the future.
And there's what's called in-the-money and out-of-the-money.
And in-the-money is when the stock is trading at the exercise price of the option.
Now, for something like GameStop, which is trading at distress levels on its stock, etc., I mean, I think when people were looking at this, the stock was probably trading around $6 a share, something like that.
The underlying options on the stock, generically speaking, would have probably been trading at pennies on the dollar, because the assumption would be that The stock wasn't going to reach the price where the options could be exercised, could be turned into stock.
So the options were viewed as likely to expire worthless, and they were trading primarily really with what we call option value, kind of where the name came from.
However, as the price of the stock began to move up, as this buying picked up and new investors came into the fray, despite the high level of short interest that existed, then all of a sudden these options start moving up sequentially in value.
And at a much more rapid rate than the underlying common stock itself.
So, you know, for every X move in the price of stock, you had an exponentially higher move in the price of the options.
And, you know, suddenly these options, which were on the broker's books, you know, they had them sort of as a risk management perspective.
As being marked as likely to expire worthless, suddenly it's looking like that they need to make delivery on these options.
So suddenly they are exposed to not having enough GameStop stock to cover these pending options that are coming at them because of the rise in the stock price.
So they then need to go get some stock on their books to balance out their sort of risk portfolios, if you will, because they're always trying to keep themselves neutral in risk.
And so as the prices of the options rose dramatically, what looked to be a worthless option that was unlikely to be exercised is now looking very much like it's going to be exercised and they need to go get more of the common stock of GME in the market to cover that risk.
And that creates another area of buying and an accelerated buying cycle that takes place in the market.
I mean, that's incredible.
So now you can see how this stock just suddenly started moving up like crazy.
I guess it's just over the last week and a bit longer.
Yeah, I think what's important to note is it's probably very easy to just see this as GME investors, a lot of retail guys coming in and driving all of the upward volatility in the stock.
And yes, they play a very large role in that and started it.
But as that goes on and as they began to be successful and the stock price moves higher, That changes the risk profile on the books for the people that had sold the underlying options, etc.
Then they need to adjust their risk.
In doing so, they need to buy themselves.
It brings a whole other buyer into the marketplace that typically isn't talked about as much.
It is an increased cycle of buying.
We haven't even addressed the short sellers yet.
The short sellers are required to At some point, go ahead and cover their bet.
And they need to do that by buying back the shares that they sold short.
And that was the fundamental play that was being looked at by the retail guys to begin with, is that as this price moved up, if it didn't go in the direction that the short sellers were betting, the short sellers were going to be forced to go out there and buy stock in the market themselves to cover their short position.
And so that's been ongoing.
There's one large hedge fund that Has stated that they've closed out their short.
Whether or not that's entirely true, I guess I can't testify to this point.
The short interest is still very, very high in GME. Now, some of that probably comes from other hedge funds that have come into this mix and may have re-established short positions at much higher levels, thinking that one way or the other, ultimately, GME is going to go down on fundamentals.
But the short interest that's out there is still very, very high, which, you know, you kind of look at that as incremental demand in a sort of a perverse fashion, that at some point those shorts need to be closed out and covered.
And, you know, that's done by obtaining stock, which right now is very hard to find.
So we have a very unique situation and we have a uniquely high price in the security.
Well, and so something really interesting happened, you know, as this price was going up, I think it was on the 28th, all sorts of, I guess, action, so to speak, happened.
We had all sorts of, I guess, financial pundits, I don't know if you call them that, but basically talking about the stock, saying, oh my goodness, this is ridiculous.
This isn't the real value, for example.
We had platforms like Robinhood actually stopping the selling of the stock, right?
Or sorry, pardon me, stopping the buying of the stock, right?
Presumably, this looked like all sorts of activity actually to try to lower the price.
And I'm wondering if you could tell me about that.
And it seems to have worked on Thursday, the 28th, but then on the 29th, we saw backward to an upward motion.
Well, I guess that's kind of a complicated question.
There's a lot of different things going on here.
But, you know, I think the generic backdrop to all this is kind of the little guy against the big street firms.
And in this case, the little guy has been winning.
And, you know, Robinhood, which is one broker of many, but just happened to be used by a To buy GME halted the ability to make incremental purchases in GME. I think you are right.
It was on Thursday when they did that.
There was also some discussion that they were liquidating some holders' accounts, including accounts that may or may not have actually been margin accounts.
So that whole backdrop is still a little foggy, but the reality was they restricted any further buying in these accounts.
The answer as to why they did that is also a little complicated and also not entirely known.
Some of that was probably stemming from real risk management, because as the price swelled up, that does change the way their books look and the internal risk adjustments they have to take.
But for most of their investors, their investors were long buyers, so they had hard assets in their account in the form of this GME stock.
Now, I don't know what the structure of their You know, their individual accounts look like, where they might have borrowed elsewhere, etc.
Who knows?
But I have seen some people kind of make the argument that, you know, well, it was all due to the buying of the GME stock, but the GME stock was a purchase.
It wasn't a short sell.
Now, it may have been done on margin.
And again, there are risk requirements that these firms have to manage themselves.
So that was very much a part of it.
One question I do have, though, is, you know, there is...
Robinhood is...
This online platform that says, you know, we don't charge any commission.
Well, in effect, they do.
I mean, everybody needs to get paid.
They just do it in a different way.
And Robinhood is, you know, aggregating all these orders, but they are then turning them over to a broker that's behind them for execution of that order.
And they actually get paid for that, for this order flow that comes in.
So, There's an executor, the much larger firm that's behind Robinhood, that Robinhood sends all these orders to to be traded.
And that broker gets to see all that information coming into the market about who's buying, when they're buying, at what levels, how much, etc., etc.
And Robinhood receives some fees from that.
But Robinhood also, I believe, gets some action on the execution price.
Now, I believe it was December 20th, Robinhood was actually fined $65 million by the SEC for receiving kind of exorbitant fees and not getting their clients' trades processed at the proper level.
So there is kind of a whole other aspect going on here.
But that leads to one of the other questions I have in regards to Robinhood saying we can't execute more buy orders.
I will be curious to see if the person behind them I don't know that's the case.
I want to be real clear on that, but I would like to get an answer there.
Jeff, what do you make of the financial punditry, as I would call it, basically saying, These platforms or the retail users of these platforms are manipulating the market.
This is unfair.
This needs to be regulated in some cases.
People have said it.
And this is kind of an outrage.
What do you make of all this?
Yeah, well, I mean, first off, you know, there's no doubt that GameStop is trading above its fundamental valuations.
But that's not to say there's value there.
And there is value there at a price just based on the short of loan.
In other words, if you're just approaching the situation rationally and you look at this, you can make a very clear case that, yeah, this is ridiculous on a fundamental basis, although you might try to make a different case.
That's just my opinion, that it's ridiculous on a fundamental basis.
But there is clearly real value in the very unique situation that's ongoing right now.
It's also worth remembering, though, that that cuts both ways.
What goes up can come down.
And when these kind of situations unravel themselves in reverse, it can be just as volatile, maybe even more so on the downside.
So I guess I just want to be real clear that I'm not encouraging one way or the other anything here, but just noting that it is rational to understand that some of these small investors see value, if not in the fundamentals, in the uniqueness of the situation that's going on right now.
Now, you had asked about, you know, financial pundits kind of pounding their chests and browbeating and saying this is terrible, etc.
Well, it is, to me, somewhat ironic.
If we step back to the financial crisis of 2008, it was these same hedge funds, you know, that were being pilloried for shorting a lot of these different companies, and it was these financial firms that ended up getting a ton of bailouts.
And now we've stepped forward to the situation we have today, and suddenly it's the retail investor that's being pilloried for driving up the stock of the price, and it's the folks doing the shorting that are kind of not being called out as aggressively.
My own personal opinion is that I guess my fundamental concern is that this is going to lead to increased regulation, and I firmly believe there shouldn't be any.
The situation should be allowed to play out.
One of the points that I make in my article is essentially, one of the big problems here is that the party that's to blame is the hedge funds that were not engaging in proper risk management.
And these are big institutional big boy players.
To come in and bring the hammer down on the small investor and just say that where these levels are trading is ridiculous and you have no business trading in the security here, Seems kind of high-handed to me.
I mean, effectively, you know, that's an external force to the market coming in and dictating what is appropriate price, what is appropriate valuation, and what is not.
And that's something that I think is really alarming.
And I also question a little bit the motives because the hedge funds who are very well connected politically and kind of institutionally, etc., you know, they're the ones that are being hurt in this case.
So, To listen to Financial Pundits kind of browbeat the small investor strikes me as somewhat ironic in this scenario.
I just wanted to clarify, just in case anyone is mistaken in this way, nothing in this episode is meant to be construed as financial advice or anything remotely in that realm.
We're just kind of looking at it from an outside perspective.
Maybe I should just make the statement right now.
I do not own anything in GameStop.
I haven't owned anything in GameStop.
I don't plan to own anything in GameStop.
We're acting as an observer in this situation.
Yeah, and likewise myself.
So Jeff, there's a class action lawsuit that's been launched against Robinhood once they basically created this scenario where people couldn't buy anymore.
Yeah, and that was the situation that you alluded to that we were discussing that happened on Thursday where they couldn't make any more purchases.
And, you know, additionally, I think what part of the lawsuit is also focusing on is situations where people were forced to sell.
And that's where things get a little bit more gray, where it's not entirely clear if that just happened because they needed more collateral in their accounts and didn't have it and those were the accounts where the sales were taking place.
If so, that's kind of par for the course.
If an investor gets overextended or whatever and can't put it more collateral, The brokerage firm that runs the account has the right to take action there to raise liquidity.
But it doesn't really sound like that's what was going on in the Robinhood situation.
And it sounds like in some cases, people just found that their holdings were liquidated at different levels.
But again, we don't have all the details with that.
But certainly nobody began trading with the brokerage firm Robinhood.
Again, just one of many.
If you have problems with Robinhood, go find another broker, open an account and trade with them.
There's plenty of well-capitalized firms that didn't engage in this.
But regardless, if you were somebody who opened an account with Robinhood, I'm sure you didn't do this thinking that you might wake up one day and find that you weren't, for reasons specific to Robinhood, allowed to buy more shares of the company that you were primarily playing in, in this case GameStop.
And so, you know, I haven't looked closely at the lawsuit, but certainly it is It is circling around those different factors.
Jeff, there's also this sort of emotional or social element to all of this.
You can't help but notice that the financial sector is one of the few industries that's done quite well for itself over the past year during coronavirus or CCP virus.
A lot of the retail investors are likely to be people who haven't done as well It's kind of an interesting scenario, and there's certainly in the social media channels and so forth, I've seen a lot of people seeing this as an opportunity to kind of get back at the big guy.
Yeah, I mean, it's certainly, this is a very unique situation, unlike anything I've seen before, at least of this magnitude, and it is kind of a David versus Goliath.
And, you know, there's a lot of people kind of cheering for the retail investor.
And you're clearly seeing these large investors kind of a bit back on the ropes.
Although I would caution, again, there's a whole other group of head funds that I'm sure have gotten involved in this scenario and have been able to take advantage of the new pricing.
They probably reset shorts up in the 300 level.
You know, so it is no longer what was viewed as kind of the retail guys, and that's how it started out primarily, the retail guys against sort of Wall Street.
That entire pool is probably a lot more muddied and a lot more mingled than what it was.
But it is really ironic to see some of these, you know, kind of the Wall Street firms, the hedge funds, crying foul and pointing the finger at the small investor.
You know, as you said, this was a banner year for a lot of the big firms, the sort of the so-called prime brokers.
Underwriting fees were up like crazy, etc.
Very, very profitable years.
Now, these were the same companies that had gotten into incredible trouble back in the 2007, 2008, 2009 scenario when the whole financial crisis hit and they needed to get bailed out.
So, you know, it's pretty ironic to see the same guys that had to come to sort of Joe Public, Uncle Sam, for a huge amount of money just to remain in business and are now making record profits.
Are the ones that are crying foul at the little guy, at the individual investors who, you know, I mean, I think it was Leon Cooperman.
I saw some snippet where he said something to the effect of these guys are sitting around at home and they're getting their checks from the government.
And, you know, boy, I guess you could consider that kind of a poorly timed comment to make.
These are a lot of people that maybe simply haven't had the opportunity to work For the last year because of the scenario we've been going through and have gotten, you know, very little help.
And they're looking for a way to augment income.
And they found a very unique situation and have been taking advantage of it.
You know, I am very much the kind of person who sort of let the market sort it out and have no intervention whatsoever.
And whether it was intended as such or not, you know, what Robin Hood did on Thursday by not allowing incremental buys certainly served as a form of intervention because it took a At least temporarily until people could open up new brokerage accounts, what have you.
It took a source of demand off and resulted in a lower price for game stock, which clearly favored the hedge fund guys who were short.
So, you know, a lot of moving parts here and a lot of different players.
But the irony of the big guys crying foul right now is something that probably should be pointed out.
JP Morgan earlier this week had named, I think, 45 different stocks that might be susceptible to this kind of a scenario where a short squeeze is possible.
Is this something you expect to play out again?
And if it does, of course it would be accompanied with more calls for the same kind of regulation.
Look, it's happening again.
What do you think?
Well, Yeah, I guess there's two things there.
One, a true short squeeze is kind of rare.
And yes, people will be looking for it.
But I think the bigger call is just going to come from the fact that folks are looking for the next play, whatever that might be.
And, you know, so we see another company, you know, AMC Entertainment was one of those, but we see another one of these companies go through something similar, albeit probably not as dramatic.
Due to some of the unique qualities that surrounded the GameStop situation.
But we see another one of these situations, and you have regulators and members of Congress saying, look, our financial markets are being manipulated, it's out of control, we need to do something.
Again, I see those comments as being somewhat one-sided.
And also, just coming from the background, the markets will ultimately figure this out.
You know, we don't need external forces such as members of Congress coming in and sort of being arbiters of what our value.
And going down that path is really, that's the bigger concern for me.
I mean, that's what kind of drew me to this situation was a concern that we were going to see outside folks come in and try and put certain levels of controls on the market.
And, you know, in essence, that's what the hedge funds were asking for.
You know, they wanted to have something to be done You know, in your article, you refer to the Federal Reserve as an example of, you know, basically impacting the markets or having a strong effect on the markets, and you criticize that.
Yeah, I mean, the Federal Reserve is, you know, I guess the way I sort of look at the Federal Reserve, it's got this mythical status to it, but ultimately it's a group of, you know, X number of individuals who get together and make prognostications on the future of the market and what they need to do, if anything, to help it out.
And the Fed is notorious for pumping excess liquidity into the market.
And our recently nominated Treasury Secretary, Secretary Janet Yellen, she was the Fed Chair for a large number of years.
And frankly, the entirety of the time that she was in office She kept real interest rates, in other words, interest rates after you remove the inflation effect, kept real interest rates in negative territory, which in my opinion is, well, that's more intervention than should be done by the Fed.
So the Fed typically has a tendency to...
I think it would be fair to say that there's always a politicized factor that's inherent to being a Fed chairman, whether you...
You know, can avoid it or not, I guess that depends, but it's there.
You were appointed, and you do have political pressure on you to have the markets perform.
And, you know, sometimes there can be too much liquidity puts in, which creates a situation of very easy money, which then creates a situation of excess risk taken by the market, which can lead to crashes.
And that's happened time and again.
So, you know, I think you might be able to make a case that the Fed's done a lot more Have done more harm than good throughout its history.
But I was pointing fingers at the Fed as you want to talk about a market manipulator.
Inherently, that's kind of their job is increasing or decreasing the supply of money from an external vantage point.
Well, so to finish up on this whole question, you know, we just ended up, I think it was $328 approximately was the close on Friday.
I know there is still stuff happening, you know, during the weekend.
What is going to happen next here?
I mean, as far as that goes, I don't know the answer better than anybody else.
I mean, at some point, the situation will Kind of hit a resolution and things will unwind and how violently and how quickly that happens remains to be seen.
But I do worry that what we may have is increased interference in the market and that there's already calls for sort of quote-unquote doing something about what's going on with these retail guys and putting some sort of constraints on them.
And you could do that by Requiring that there's a certain amount of money that's set up to open a brokerage account.
So you could say, well, hey, you got to have $25,000 before you could open a brokerage account.
You could require some sort of licensing, et cetera, that would restrict that.
And that's something that I'm concerned that may spring out of this.
And I guess I'm equally concerned that as we're going through this process, you know, it's an opportunity for government to make sort of a power grab and Continue to consolidate market controls at the level of the large Wall Street firms and with the government regulators.
It's dangerous when you have an outside entity say that they think that something's overvalued and then move to regulate on that belief.
The market is the ultimate arbiter of value.
And yes, there can be all types of Well, Jeff, so before we finish up, you know, You've been on this show a number of times before.
We've had some great conversations, but on a completely different topic.
We were talking about the origins of the crossfire hurricane investigation.
We were talking about Russiagate.
We were talking about the Mueller investigation back in the day.
And just recently, a certain player in all of this, Kevin Clinesmith, had a verdict on his You know, guilty plea has come through and I just wanted to get you to talk about that.
Give us your reaction.
I guess a little bit of shock and surprise, frankly.
I think it's become clear that, you know, any sort of wide-ranging scope or, you know, a pending slew of indictments or what have you, that none of that was going to happen.
But Kevin Clinesmith was an FBI lawyer and And in regards to the Crossfire Hurricane, in early 2017, he was a senior FBI lawyer that was assigned to this thing and was working on it.
And he made some knowing falsifications to emails regarding Carter Page and submitted those, and those made their way into the FISA. And while I certainly hoped for a lot more than, say, just Kevin Clinesmith, I had expected that there was, it was very clear.
It was very clear what had happened with him, and I had expected there to be ramifications.
And instead, you know, we found out the judge came in, and it was Judge Boasberg, who's actually a FISA judge.
He's also in one of the pipeline cases currently, I believe.
But he yesterday heard the case, and I think Carter Page was actually there testifying, you know, as to the impact that this took place on him, a guy who's Never been charged, didn't do anything wrong, but got caught up in all of this, in part as a result of Clinesmith's actions.
You know, we know two of the four FISAs have already been deemed illegal.
If they ever get to reviewing the other two, I'm sure those will be deemed illegal as well.
And Clinesmith was assigned no jail time and a $100 assessment.
I'm not sure if it was even technically a fine.
It may have been considered an assessment, like for court costs, whatever.
In addition to, I believe it was a year's probation and some community service.
So, you know, somebody put it out there on Twitter yesterday, and they said something to the effect of, well, I guess, you know, this is what Spygate all comes down to, is, you know, $100 fine and no prison sentence for anybody.
And the significance of this doesn't lie so much with Clinesmith himself, but rather this prevailing concern amongst I think anybody who'd been looking closely at this situation is that there's no accountability on the government side.
And this sort of feeling that the DOJ protects its own, takes care of its own, government takes care of its own.
And, you know, we could have all the sequence and we could have four years of investigation.
You had the Clinton campaign that paid for the Steele dossier to kick this whole mess off.
The resulting four-year fracas that took place with all the dislocations, you had the implementation of the Mueller Special Counsel, and at the end of all this, a bunch of people that were participants in this ended up getting high-paying jobs with the cable companies, you know, to be kind of guest spots, etc.
And you had a lawyer who was caught dead to rights, and he's got a $100 fine, and, you know, don't do that again.
And that's just been really disheartening, I think, for a lot of folks.
Jeff, any final thoughts before we finish up?
Well, I mean, again, you know, the GameStop situation is one that's of great interest for a variety of reasons to a lot of people.
But the primary interest from my perspective is one of concern to see what the government may decide to come in and do to sort of control the situation.
I don't even like that word, but that's what they're looking for.
To control the situation, to kind of prevent it from happening in the future.
And what exactly they'll do remains unknown, but that is where my concern lies.
And if they take one step in that direction, what's to prevent them from taking another step in that direction?
Well, Jeff Carlson, it's such a pleasure to have you on again.
Yeah, and always great talking with you.
Thank you very much for having me.
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