300. Wall Street, the XXI century connection between Howard Pile and George Orwell

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Pile wrote, in the late XIX Century, The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood, highly recommended bedside reading for any young teenager. Orwell wrote the outstanding Animal Farm, which I have quoted previously, highly recommended bedside reading for older teenagers. In it, Napoleon enunciates the darkly meaningful All pigs are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others. This week, in Wall Street, Robin Hood Trading suspended GameStop shares to control volatility, as private investors teamed up to drive up the price, in a move which has cost shorting hedge funds a fortune, and, for once, transferred wealth from funds to small investors. Robin Hood’s action seems to protect the rich from the poor, hardly the modus operandi of the Middle Ages folklore hero the trading platform takes its name from. This makes for a great, Orwellian conspiracy theory, but I fear the true explanation is more prosaic, related to Robin Hood’s lack of financial resources to cover exposures, as it must do in law 

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Location: Hereford, UK

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