Don't you think this straw-manning is just a little bit excessive?

Also, point #2 seems flat out wrong. Short interest accounting for 140% of all outstanding stock is extremely reckless. It's like the Beirut port authority storing tons upon tons of explosive fertilizer in a warehouse so they could shake down a ship owner for some port fees. Sure, it didn't seem so bad for years when nothing happened, but the giant crater (not to mention human carnage) says they've got a much bigger problem than port fees.

> On an aside, it seems the market can't ever get a break. If it crashes and unemployment skyrockets, it was due to some fat cats gambling. If the market skyrockets and unemployment is high, now the fat cats are making money off the backs of everyone else. If the market skyrockets and unemployment is low, well, everyone isn't sharing in the gains equally.

Guess what: people complain about all sorts of things. It's a human thing.

Financial markets would appeal to more people if they didn't appear biased, particularly biased in favor of the wealthy. I think if the players in the '08 crisis had at least gone into disgrace running gas stations in Middle America (I'm not even asking for jail time, unlike some), some of these populists might think there's some form of justice. But that didn't happen. The big banks got bailouts, and millions of people lost homes and jobs.

The just, ethical thing to do would be to end too big to fail. If a bank makes too many promises it can't keep, it should go under. The most the government should do is supervise a swift and orderly bankruptcy. If I were a lawmaker today, I'd be doing that exact thing: make these "too big to fail" companies keep meticulous records of exactly which assets they have, which liabilities, and let the thousands of smaller banks bid on them like vultures in the event of a failure (which is inevitable, given a decade plus moral hazard).

Here's another thing (more related to the GME situation): when the repo market started showing weird signs in 2019, the Fed stepped in and added massive liquidity. Fair enough, a financial crisis is something the Fed is supposed to prevent (ancillary to its somewhat silly dual - actually triple - mandate for high economic growth, low unemployment and steady long-run interest rates). However, when we were supposedly minutes from a financial crisis on Thursday, the Fed was nowhere to be found to inject cash into these brokerages and clearinghouses to secure retail trades. Are people on Robinhood trading repos or commercial paper or something? Of course not. That's for the big boys, the ones who get bailed out because they're "too big to fail." (Please spare me in advance with comments about how this violates X, Y or Z rule or something. Rules and norms have clearly not constrained the Fed much since September 2008, so why should the GME situation stop them now? The Fed has been creative - ingenious, even - at figuring out how to expand its balance sheet and take other policy actions - interest on reserves, anyone? - that were have novel effects.)

It's easy to make straw-man arguments against populist comments from an Internet blog, especially ones that were somewhat ignorant (I happen to agree with you about the comment betraying some ignorance about buy-and-hold). But that does not mean such a comment is representative. Does there exist a version of the story of what happened with GME that is much tighter in terms of facts but has the same "I don't trust the system!" sentiment? If there is, shouldn't the defenders of the market take it seriously, particularly those who do HFT for market makers?