Courtesy of Pam Martens
Hedge Fund Billionaire Ken Griffin to Testify at February 18, 2021 House Financial Services Committee Hearing
The billionaire hedge fund titan of Citadel LLC and its market-making/trade execution arm, Citadel Securities, delivered a load of horse pukky in his written testimony to the House Financial Services Committee. Griffin is slated to appear as one of six witnesses at the hearing scheduled at noon today to examine the trading in shares of GameStop in January.
GameStop is the brick-and-mortar video game retailer whose stock soared from $18.84 on December 31 of last year to an intraday high of $483 on January 28 – an unprecedented run of 2,465 percent in four weeks by a struggling retail outlet. The stock price then quickly plunged back to earth. It closed yesterday at $45.94.
GameStop is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Its shares are not supposed to trade like a penny stock operated out of a boiler room. The contours of today’s hearing are an indictment of what Wall Street watchers have been warning about for the past decade: markets are dangerously rigged in the U.S.
According to the written remarks Griffin submitted for the hearing, which are typically read by the witness at the opening of the session, he’s going with the approach that the Chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, Jamie Dimon, used when he was hauled before Congressional Committees to explain how his federally-insured bank had used depositors’ money to gamble in high-risk derivatives in London in 2012 and lose $6.2 billion.
At a June 19, 2012 House hearing on the matter, Dimon told House members that “the starting point should be that the United States has the best, widest, deepest, most transparent capital markets in the world.” If any part of that statement is true, it’s certainly not because of Wall Street but because of career criminal prosecutors. In the past six years, JPMorgan Chase has pleaded guilty to five felony counts, three of which involved rigging the foreign exchange, Treasury and precious metals markets, respectively.
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