Congressional hearings likely will be necessary to investigate the decision behind Robinhood and other outlets to stop trading for solo investors into GameStop and other stocks while major investors continued to trade this week, Sen. Tom Cotton said Friday.
"(The) investors have done nothing the major institutional investors don't do to each other all the time by the so-called short squeeze, buying stocks that the institutional investors are short on," the Arkansas Republican said on Fox News' "America's Report." "The trades have to be conducted on an equal and fair basis, and several investors who are making money, sometimes a lot of money, at the expense of these institutional investors shouldn't be shut out on the market and shut out on the trades."
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Friday warned brokerages and social media traders alike that it is monitoring potential illegal actions, waded into the battle between small investors and Wall Street hedge funds on Friday, warning both brokerages and the pack of social media traders that it was closely monitoring for the potential of wrongdoing.
Cotton, though, said that even though lawmakers should get to the bottom of what happened, that doesn't necessarily mean the government should respond.
"We do need to examine it and especially the closure of trading platforms for some of the solo investors," said Cotton. "I don't want to jump to conclusions but I want to make sure we get to the bottom of what happened and that we have a well-functioning fair marketplace that is allowing anyone who wants to trade, to trade in stocks and that is helping companies raise the money they need to grow and provide jobs and provide goods and services in the marketplace. That's a point of the hearing, not to jump to conclusions or to condemn any one actor."
Meanwhile, Cotton commented about the dozens of executive orders that President Joe Biden has issued since taking office, saying that he has gone "too far" with them.
"Why don't we ask some of those 7,000 blue-collar workers if they think it was unifying to cancel their jobs?" said Cotton. "We have people that have pickup trucks and tractors on the farm that need access to gasoline and diesel. I'd hate to see us hamstring ourselves when we have achieved energy independence, and also kill hundreds of thousands of jobs in the oil and gas production sector."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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