New Broker, New Price on Round Hill Road
/326 round Hill Road, just north of the Merritt, now asking $5.2 million. The former listing at $6.495 this past December 31st, so it seems we have a realistic owner, which is always refreshing.
Contracts Reported
/19 Weston Hill Road, Riverside, $3.950 million. Purchased new in 2013 for $3.995 million, it came on the market in September at $4.250, and after an intermediate price cut, dropped to its current price on January 19th. That did the trick. Excellent location, good house, so no surprise here.
19 Weston Hill Road
24 Martin Dale North, $2.3 million. Another excellent street, this one in what’s almost central Greenwich. I’d say it was within easy walking distance to the Avenue, but your legs may differ. Still, it’s close. It spent just 17 days on the market; deduct the normal time spent on building inspections and contract negotiations, and that time shrinks considerably.
24 Martin Dale N
All fixed, all the time
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Remember the Reddit-GameStop trading boom? Well, it’s spreading. To other publicly traded companies like AMC Entertainment and Nokia.
But something else is spreading, too, among trading companies like Robinhood:
From Facebook, Twitter et al, banning opposing voices, major retailers refusing to sell MyPillows, employers firing Trump supporters, and the general cancel culture roiling the country, the establishment is out to quash all opposition. And when the Establishment’s favorite source of money is threatened, everyone from the federal government to so-called-independent trading platforms circles the wagons.
Hedge fund billionaires are not popular with most of America, so protecting them against the little people (and calling those little people “Nazis”, and the business press is currently doing) won’t go down well. Add all this to the Greens’ destroying the jobs of millions of blue collar workers, and there’s trouble brewing.
Addendum
One more thought: stock manipulation has been going on since at least the Dutch Tulip Bulb Bubble of the 1600s, but the advent of the Internet made raid much easier to accomplish and more widespread. In the late 90s, “investment” sites provided a platform for sellers to pump and dump stocks early and often, but back then, it was mostly individuals ripping off other individuals, and little was done to stop them, because who cares? This current craze will also see huge profits for some and losses for others, but for the first time, the sucker pool includes short-selling hedge funds, and that’s the difference. Now they care.
Phooee.
Not the Bee
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Holy cow, that’s just cuckoo!
Biting the hand that feeds me, but so what? It's delicious
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Cany you see his tears from here? I can.
How a bunch of Reddit amateurs stuck it to Wall Street
The craziest financial story of the week has got to be GameStop stock’s meteoric rise from $6 a share to $340 a share overnight. It all began when Melvin Capital hedge-fund managers decided to short GameStop, betting the stock would fall. But a lot of retail investors viscerally hate billion-dollar hedge-fund managers who make a living manipulating the stock market and driving small investors out of the game.
The investors on Reddit’s “Wall Street Bets” page got together to buy, buy, buy GameStop and drove the stock way up, costing Melvin Capital billions of dollars. You could say it was a massive redistribution of Wall Street wealth to Main Street traders.
Kickboxing champion Andrew Tate said, “If I have to lose six million to destroy Wall Street, I’m ready to f*cking go. F*ck ’em. These people on Reddit are geniuses.” He went on to explain why he and a lot of people don’t like Wall Street hedge-fund tycoons:
“They’re the worst people on earth…they have no talent, they don’t make money, they just have a pot of money and they manipulate markets to make their pot go up with other people’s money and they get bailed out by the government anyway. They’re the worst people in the world.”
Tate laughed uproariously imagining Melvin Capital financial teams waking up to the news that GameStop had a 600% increase overnight and wiped out 30% of their entire net worth. (Tate can be seen in the YouTube video at the bottom of this article.) Rumors of bankruptcy prompted a cash bailout of $2.75 billion by billionaire investors to keep Melvin Capital solvent.
Tate’s assessment may be a bit harsh, I suppose, but as someone who devoted much of his time in the 80s and the 90s ferreting out and pursuing dishonest stock brokers and their employers and witnessed how they lied, cheated and stole from their customers, I share Tate’s disdain for the industry.
I cheered when Bear Sterns went down; the company provided clearing services and financing for some of the worst bucket shops then operating — the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’s Stratton Oakmont was just one of them —so good riddance, and don’t come back.
And the fall of Lehman Brothers, whose phony real estate loan portfolio was leveraged $40-$1, was just deserts. Of course, Dick Fuld, the man responsible, still retains his mansion at 771 North Street, his ranch in Idaho, and the swell digs on Jupiter Island, which he transferred to his wife to shield it under Florida’s homestead bankruptcy exemption, but that’s just part of the game.
Sadly, just as Fuld and his peers escaped justice then, his contemporaries will now; already, NASDAQ and the U.S. government are moving to freeze trading in GameStock to allow the big boys to work out privately the “adjustment” of their losses and return the serfs to their proper place. And this won’t end up well for the amateurs — it never does. Those who came in early and have already gotten out will prosper, late comers will find no chair to sit on when the music stops.
But I understand the anger of deplorables, and their lingering resentment at the Wall Street bailout via TARP, funded by the middle class for benefit of the elite.
But we'll destroy our economy anyway, because, er, because we’re WOKE, damn it!
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From China, with love
Kerry admits zero emissions in US won’t make a difference in climate change
“Not when almost 90 percent of all of the planet’s global emissions come from outside of US borders. We could go to zero tomorrow and the problem isn’t solved,” Kerry conceded.
The former secretary of state, now Biden’s climate envoy, acknowledged that it would be difficult to bring the world’s top polluters to the tab
China, by the way, is adding one coal-fired power plant a week. and financing billions of dollars of coal-powered steel mills and power plants, every year, throughout the Third World.
As usual, America's Paper of Record is ahead of conventional press jackals like Shepard Smith
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Babylon Bee, January 25, 2021:
Triple-Masker Looks Down on People Who Only Double-Mask
U.S.—Health experts are now recommending that people double mask -- place a second mask over the first mask -- to better protect themselves from the virus, or maybe to protect others from themselves possibly having the virus (it’s still kind of unclear). Many are denouncing this recommendation, especially triple-maskers, who find it wholly inadequate.
“I guess I’d only double mask if I didn’t really care about not killing grandma,” said the extremely muffled Mark Carlson, who was wearing three masks at once. “But I have three masks on because there’s an ongoing pandemic and I care.”
Triple-maskers point out that three masks are 50% more effective than two masks. “If the virus somehow makes it past two masks, then we’re all done for,” said Karen Walker, although her exact words were unclear as it was kind of hard to hear her through three masks. “But not if you have a third mask. The virus wasn’t expecting that.”
“Really, I can’t see any reason to wear only two masks unless you’re some kind of misanthrope who wants to see everyone die,” she added.
January 26, 2021
CNBC recommends wearing three masks to increase their “efficiency”. I’d suggest that they mean “efficacy”, but they don’t know what they’re saying in the first place, so why bother?
Cos Cob contract
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35 Mianus View Terrace, $1.335 million. The bedrooms are small, which is typical for an 1886 house, but overall, the house is very pleasing, to my eye. There are many houses out there at this price that are not nearly so appealing.
The listing mentions that the house was built by “the renowned artist, Leonard Ochtman”, which left this philistine clueless, so I looked him up. Turns out he was part of the Cos Cob Art Colony, which is pretty neat.
Love the house, but I’m not sure I’d want to pay the bill when the time for re-roofing comes around.
