The First However

One of my college professors once said something that has stayed with across the years to the effect that he never really paid much attention to any undergraduate paper until the first “however”. That occured to me as I read Holman Jenkins’s most recent Wall Street Journal column. He opens well enough which what might be the wisecrack of the day:

News is “man bites dog.” What often follows is a deluge of “analysis” about how men biting dogs is our new normal.

He continues with a lengthy exposition of the GameStop episode and a defense of the salutary role of short sellers before reaching his first however:

None of this justifies brokerages cutting off genuine, self-funding, risk-accepting customers from trading the stocks they want, as some brokerages were accused of doing on Thursday. Also unneeded were the more-populist-than-thou wheezes of certain politicians like Ted Cruz and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who were merely guessing about what was happening in markets. Saddest of all was the Biden administration, still finding its sea legs, feeling the need to rush out repeated statements saying it was “monitoring” the behavior of GameStop shares.

I think that the story of insiders who’ve been using money borrowed essentially at zero interest to enrich themselves through selling short being rallied ’round by other insiders when they’re caught by the short and curlies by a bunch of amateurs is a legitimate story and, moreover, a great illustration of the enormous power for disruption provided by social media.

That is the new normal and the sooner we find ways of coping with it without providing platforms for insider propaganda and abridging speech the better off we will be.