Peak Prosperity, Released on 1/29/21

An epic David-vs-Goliath battle has erupted on Wall Street.

And it may just change the future of investing, helping to tilt the playing field away from the huge unfair advantage the banking cartel has enjoyed for decades.

In case you’ve been sleeping under a rock for the past week: millions of individual investors have banded together using Reddit chat boards, Twitter and other forms of social media to wage concentrated attacks against large hedge funds who were recklessly (and possibly illegally) over-shorting the stocks of weak companies.

This has resulted in a series of “Infinite Short Squeezes” that has rocketed the prices of previously-troubled stocks like GameStop (GME) and AMC Entertainment Holdings (AMC) by thousands of percent over the past two weeks, creating massive losses for the over-exposed hedge funds — a number of whom now find themselves at risk of insolvency from the damage.

Famed researcher Jim Bianco joins us this week to break down exactly what’s going on here, which is a much bigger story than just the recent crazy price action. The Wall Street model is becoming disrupted by new technologies and an emerging collective ‘people power’ that threaten to strip the banking cartel of the unfair power it wields. And rather than lean into the change and evolve its model, the cartel is stubbornly resisting and instead trying to crush the agents of change.

We have seen this desperate denial from a dying regime many times throughout history, and it always ends the same. We only need look at how the taxi medallion cartel failed to stop the Uber/Lyft rideshare model for a recent example.

Of course, this breakout of hostilities only adds to the volatility of a market tenuously holding on to the highest asset price valuations on record. Will the turbulence act as a catalyst to the massive correction more and more veteran experts are predicting?

Which is why now, more than ever, is the time to partner with a financial advisor who understands the nature of the risks and opportunities in play, can craft an appropriate portfolio strategy for you given your needs, and apply sound risk management protection where appropriate.

Jim Bianco is President and Macro Strategist at Bianco Research, L.L.C. Since 1990 Jim’s commentaries have offered a unique perspective on the global economy and financial markets. Unencumbered by the biases of traditional Wall Street research, Jim has built a decades long reputation for objective, incisive commentary that challenges consensus thinking. In nearly 20 years at Bianco Research, Jim’s wide ranging commentaries have addressed monetary policy, the intersection of markets and politics, the role of government in the economy, fund flows and positioning in financial markets. Prior to joining Arbor and Bianco Research, Jim was a Market Strategist in equity and fixed income research at UBS Securities and Equity Technical Analyst at First Boston and Shearson Lehman Brothers. He is a Chartered Market Technician (CMT) and a member of the Market Technicians Association (MTA). Jim has a Bachelor of Science degree in Finance from Marquette University (1984) and an MBA from Fordham University (1989).

Adam Taggart is the President and Co-Founder of Peak Prosperity. He wears many hats, but his basic job is to handle the business side of things so that his fellow co-founder, Chris Martenson, is free to think and write. Adam is an experienced Silicon Valley internet executive and Stanford MBA. Prior to partnering with Chris (Adam was General Manager of our earlier site, ChrisMartenson.com), he was a Vice President at Yahoo!, a company he served for nine years. Before that, he did the ‘startup thing’ (mySimon.com, sold to CNET in 2001). As a fresh-faced graduate from Brown University in the early 1990s, Adam got a first-hand look at all that was broken with Wall Street as an investment banking analyst for Merrill Lynch. Most importantly, he’s a devoted husband and dad.

  amc, finance, game stop, investing, Jim Bianco, Reddit Rebellion, short squeeze, wall street bets