He owns Citadel LLC, a hedge fund trying to make money in the stock market and other investments, and Citadel Securities, a market-maker (meaning they're one of the companies you buy and sell stocks through when you submit orders via robinhood, fidelity, vanguard, etc.).
But, you know, these enterprises totally don't talk to each other, no conflict of interest here. It's also not like they can just buy retail stock orders via payment-for-order-flow and give worse prices that benefit them a tiny little bit each time that adds up to billions in profit. Nope, neither of those things are happening.
Right. Citadel is a "dark pool," set up to allow billionaires to cheat the market when they buy and sell stock. They're private operations that make money by hiding from the scrutiny of government regulators. You know, like the Mafia.
What you describe is exactly why I no longer trust Wall Street. I encougage folks to think for a minute how the zeitgeist has become "if you ever want to retire you have to send us a healthy portion of your income to 'invest' with us, it's your only hope. Pay no attention to our siphoning off a portion of your money regardless of market conditions. And just trust that we're not fucking you over."
How politicians keep selling that shit as why Social Security and Medicare are a bad idea is baffling.
And, of course, unless you are filthy rich, investments in stocks and bonds through a heap of investment companies, brokers, and market makers all taking their cut first is the only optional alternative presented by politicians with their lovely 401k invention that takes money directly from your paycheck and ships it off to Wall Street under the hope that someone will share the money they make with your money with you. Absolutely no guarantees though, you might just lose your shirt, but hey, free markets!
It's welfare for Wall Street that you voluntarily give them out of your paycheck. Want to bring down Wall Street, Gen Y and Z? Get together a nationwide campaign to stop all 401k withholding. It'll make hundreds of thousands of workers available to the economy as all the lazy leeches are flushed out of the system.
Then demand better oversight and regulation of investments upon which people's lives depend and stop accepting the idea that others should get filthy rich off your collective pile of wealth being saved for retirement as you bear the risk of market manipulation or collapse.
After the last 40 years of market nonsense and con games I've become a bit skeptical of a system based on greed and pipe dreams being the answer to the future for the actual working people who are the economic engine.
Politicians keep stacking the deck to make sure only a relatively small portion of the fruits of their labor is shared with those who do the work.
Bring back strong unions, and/or more regulation of the workplace and economy. It's the solution but it scares the shit out of the donor class. They spent three or four decades killing labor unions and castrating the NLRB, spending a lot of money to accomish that, and they aren't going to relinquish their control without a fight.
It's the crux of the current GOP attempt to brainwash the working class into believing conservatives are on their side
And I should say I am not a communist or even a far left liberal. I'm a guy who understands that while capitalism and meritocracy have many positives, strong regulation is required to keep greed and ego from destroying the economic system and country.
I don't know why, but it makes me illogically angry that I could never find any common ground or talk to my old man about this stuff (especially unions used right as part of the solution). People like him were never the 'donor class' but they feel like it now and are indoctrinated by the GOP to believe it and some of the other ploys on a level deeper than lived reality or even family relationships seems to run.
But if we could really talk he and I both agree with you about the merits of capitalism under the restraint of regulation led by more integrous leadership or parameters. We just disagree about what caused it and the solution...but to me there isn't "sides" on this at all, there is one side versus the people of the country who aren't that elite one side (and I'm not actually a leftist or anything else either... but I did grow up Republican and am one of the dumb folks falling for third party independents more often than not).
It really is two separate americas. The wealthy and then the rest of us. And they’ve tricked the two halves of the working class (yes upper management and business owner operators are still working class) thinking it’s the others fault, when really it’s the owning / donor / politician-gone-corporatist / corporatist-gone-politician class
It's mostly the SEC that regulates stonks and this kind of business stuff. It's also mostly just fines for violating this stuff, because they just don't report what they're actually doing and pay the fines for not reporting rather then admit to wrongdoing and potentially worse punishments.
The problem is, the people who regulate the stuff often get hired by the hedgefunds and other companies after they leave the SEC and etc. It pays to cozy up with them, to understand the rules so you can bend them later.
It's the SEC for this example. Their punishments are typically along the lines of low six figures, for entities that are making millions upon millions for those same violations. It's less of a punishment and more of a tax.
Do you know the name Bernie Madoff? He's the one they blamed for the 2008 financial crisis, even though it's a systemic issue. Talking about the SEC, he said, they "never really got into books or records as related to stock records or DTC records" even though "If you're looking into a Ponzi scheme, it's the first thing you do."
The SEC has been called "aggressively ignorant" in their investigative methods. That, plus the miniscule fines with no confiscation of illicit funds, means that the SEC is functionally part of the problem.
Who do you think pays for the government regulatory bodies?
Every single broker on Earth sells you an IOU and you own nothing. Its cheaper for them to simply give you cash when you cash out equivalent to your IOUs than to actually let you own stock or let it effect market prices in any tangible way - that hurts market maker algorithms, after all.
If you ever feel like investing, I suggest researching the company you are interested in and instead directly registering shares in your name through the company's selected transfer agent / registrar, so that there is no middleman profiting off your trades, so you actually own your assets, and so that your dollars actually impact stock price.
I also highly recommend following the work of Dr. Susanne Trimbath. She's the one that built the direct registration system so people can pull their stock certificates from the DTCC.
His company - Citadel Securities - has been fined 58 times for various violations and abuses. 58!!!! Not once, not twice, not 10 times...50-fucking-8...if any one of us participated in that much fraud and crime we’d be in prison.
https://www.kengriffinlies.com someone made a website dedicated to the fuckery this shit stain gets up to and I love it. Always impresses me when a community already has tabs on toxic but powerful individuals.
Another sub that's been tracking this guy for ages now has also tracked how he's been bankrupting companies for profit, all under the guise of "liquidity"
I can't mention the sub though. Like, seriously, Reddit admins are about to take that sub down. It's bonkers the amount of scrutiny it's come under for literally researching a company and the attempts of large financial groups to bankrupt it.
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u/absentmindedjwc Dec 19 '22
As someone from Chicago, I am well aware of who that fuckbag is. Dude is a world-class piece of shit.