The gallows are ready.
"When the House Financial Services Committee sent out its press release for tomorrow's hearing to take testimony from the people involved in the wild trading action of GameStop, it included just five witnesses: Keith Gill, a licensed broker who was employed at a broker-dealer at the same time he was hawking the shares of GameStop on Reddit and YouTube; Ken Griffin, the CEO of Citadel LLC, which has a related firm paying nine online brokers for order flow, thus enabling it to get an early peek at price movements; Gabe Plotkin, CEO of hedge fund Melvin Capital, which had a massive short position in GameStop and would have likely gone belly up were it not for an infusion of $2 billion from its generous competitor Citadel; Vlad Tenev, CEO of Robinhood, a trading app that abruptly put curbs on the ability of its customers to buy shares of GameStop - thus helping hedge funds with short positions.
Now, out of the blue, a new witness has popped up for tomorrow's hearing: Jennifer Schulp, the Director of Financial Regulation Studies for the Cato Institute. It's a fairly safe bet that Maxine Waters, a Democrat who Chairs the House Financial Services Committee, did not call this witness. If we were to make a wild guess as to who wanted this witness at the hearing, it would be the Republican ranking member of the Committee, Patrick McHenry, whose top donors are big firms on Wall Street that don't want to see the GameStop fiasco result in tightened regulations."
Not-Q