Glenn Greenwald on GameStop and market manipulation

They knew that by playing the game that these hedge fund managers typically play, which is manipulating the market for their own benefit, they could also enrich themselves. Now, if manipulating the market to the enrichment of the people doing it is what Wall Street does every day - it's what hedge funds do all the time - the only thing that is different in this case is that instead of hedge fund billionaires making billions of dollars and getting rich off market manipulation, its a bunch of anonymous Reddit trolls who have bounded together to do it. 

~ Glenn Greenwald, "The Reddit Rebellion: Gameplay and Melvin Capital," 11:20 mark, January 28, 2021

Seth Klarman on current market environment

Investing today may well be harder than it has been at any time in our three decades of existence. The Fed's relentless interventions and manipulations have left few purchase targets for Baupost. The underpinnings of our economy and financial system are so precarious that the un-abating risks of collapse dwarf all other factors.

~ Seth Klarman, 2012 Annual letter to partners, 2/17/2013

Jim Grant on the transition of the US monetary system and the third Fed mandate

I think the difficulty with monetary policy is the nature of the policy itself. We have, over the years gradually, persistently elided [sp?] from a gold standard to a PhD standard. We have moved from central banking to a species of central planning. What our well-intended scholar, monetary policy mandarins are about is the manipulation of the economy, manipulation of interest rates and now, the manipulation of the stock market. You know, they had two mandates confirmed by Congress and they unilaterally have taken up a third, which is the levitation of stock prices.

~Jim Grant, author, Grant's Interest Rate Observer, CNBC's Kudlow Report, March 31, 2011

Lloyd Blankfein on dog-piling short sellers

“I’m for markets,” says Blankfein, who today describes the situation [financial panic of 2008] as “tricky.” “But when it felt like it had gotten abusive, when it was free money to short-sellers who were piling on, it felt less like the market and more like it was being manipulated.” He adds, “I crossed over.”

~ Lloyd Blankfein, CEO, Goldman Sachs, "The Bank Job," Vanity Fair, January 2010, by Bethany McLean