Dozens of members of the New York Young Republicans Club jumped on the anti-Wall Street bandwagon on Sunday and gathered in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park to destroy the hedge fund managers at GameStop.
The ‘Re-Occupy Wall Street’ protesters ripped off the big investors as ‘despicable’ for stopping last week’s Reddit-fueled run on the video game vendor to back it up after the money men bet on it.
“There is blatant corruption in the buildings around us and in Greenwich, [Ct.]wherever they are, ”Gavin Wax, the group’s president, told about 50 protesters.
“There are two standards,” Wax said. ‘There are rules for you, not for me. You have these big hedge fund guys trying to short companies, and then they were called to their bluff by a bunch of anonymous day traders on Reddit.
“And then they have the balls to call those guys unaffected,” he said. “God bless the little guy for making honest money and showing him how the market really works.”
Wax predicted that the deep-pocketed hedge financiers “are now going to cry and get their crocodile tears on CNBC and tell us, ‘Oh, you know, you’re manipulating the market.’
“These guys have been manipulating the market to their advantage for years. For years, ”he said of the wealthy equity investors.
Sunday’s protest – formed after the left-wing Occupy Wall Street demonstrations that began in the park in 2011 – stemmed from a move by some Wall Street hedge funds to bet GameStop’s stock fell, prompting a push from Reddit to buy it on trading apps like Robinhood to keep it up.
The enraged money-losing hedge funds then lobbied Robinhood to stop trading the stock to stem their losses. Robinhood has temporarily halted trading.
The gambling store, once a staple of malls in the US, was in serious decline before the populist started running on its stocks.
Robinhood got a class-action lawsuit in Manhattan last week for taking the store’s stock out of its trading options.
According to the Young Republicans, Sunday’s protest was not about political affiliations – they called it an impartial event.
“We have to take a stand today, tomorrow, and every day that emerges,” Young Republican vice president Vish Burra said at the meeting. “[Wall Street is] to make the American dream independent and ridicule American freedom. “
The group stayed in the park for about two hours before disbanding.
Among those speaking at the rally was mayors hopeful and Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, who called it hypocritical that Wall Street bankers confiscated billions of dollars in tax-funded bailouts in 2008 but are now crying falsely.
“They cheated the little people once,” Sliwa said. Let’s get these hedge fund monsters before they get us.