Elizabeth Warren Speaks Out About Robinhood Shutting Down GameStop Trades: ‘This is Not Right’
Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke out against the RobinHood app’s decision to shut down access to GameStop stocks, telling MSNBC’s Tiffany Cross that “this is not right.”
Sen. Warren became a hot topic on social media for her comments on the Gamestop chaos, and during an extensive interview on Saturday morning’s edition of The Cross Connection, spoke further on the trading flurry that roiled markets this week and prompted the Robinhood app to block its customers from buying the stock.
Ms. Cross asked Sen. Warren to weigh in on the issue, and specifically singled out lawmakers who didn’t treat the Coronavirus pandemic “with the same urgency as these random day-traders impacting the bottom line of these wealthy hedge fund managers.”
“Well, you’re right. we’re talking about a rigged system,” Warren said. “And it’s rigged in multiple ways.:
It’s rigged in that over and over, Donald Trump stood up for a year and said “No, the coronavirus will magically go away, nobody’s going to die from it,” that he recommended bleach, and what kind of accountability was there? None. And as a result the United States fell further and further behind, and more and more people died.
And now, we’re trying to move forward to acknowledge that more black and brown families got sick and died, and now we’re trying to put things back together.
But I think what’s happening with GameStop, it shows the same kind of dysfunction. What GameStop shows right now is that the Wall Street game is rigged. And it’s been rigged for years now. Hedge funds have been taking advantage of it, giant corporations have been taking advantage of it. And individual investors, over and over, catch the short end of the stick.
What happened before, up to now is, nobody wanted to hear it. They just kept covering their ears up. Pump and dump, they didn’t care, giant corporations manipulate their stock by buying back their own shares. Nobody wanted to hear it.
And then, what happens is small investors get engaged, and all of a sudden the hedge funds discover wait, there’s a casino here and we are on losing end. And then the small investors’ access gets shut down. This is not right. We need a market that is transparent and a market that is open not just to the big boys but a market that is open to individual investors and plays on a level instead of rules.
Elsewhere in the interview, Senator Warren discussed a range of other issues, including the impeachment of Trump and the negotiations on the Covid relief package.
Watch the full interview above via MSNBC.
