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American Vandal podcast

Robinhood, r/WallStreetBets, Who's Yellen Now, and the Game-Stopification of Finance



In February, I was on Matt Seybold's excellent podcast, run out of the Mark Twain center, but with a broad focus on economic history.


"During his tenure at editor of the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, Mark Twain profited by promoting the stock offerings of mining operations that advertised with the paper, and which often gave him shares so that he was incentivized to drive demand for their securities. Twain soon recognized that this formula, the touting of specious enterprises with the cooperation of a mass media platform, was being recycled on a much grander scale on Wall Street, as it has continued to be ever since, whether by Wall Street Journal columnists pumping RCA during the first retail trading boom of the 1920s, CNBC’s talking heads helping to inflate the dot-com bubble, or r/WallStreetBets posters using their forum and a new retail trading application, Robinhood, to drive up the price of GameStop."

Check out the American Vandal site for other episodes and bibliographies.


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