Hawley on Robinhood, Wall Street: ‘Shows You That the Fix Is in’

During a Friday appearance on FNC’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) criticized Wall Street for freezing out traders in the wake of trading app Robinhood restricting purchases of GameStop shares on its platform.

Hawley likened Wall Street to the big tech companies that “don’t want competition” and instead “want to be in control.” He said the reaction from Wall Street now compared to in 2008 “shows you that the fix is in.”

“What we’ve seen I think with this GameStop meltdown that Wall Street is having now, these folks at home, these day traders, retail investors, they’ve got more criticism and more scrutiny than the people who crashed the entire financial market in 2008, and they got bailed out,” Hawley advised. “I mean, the government bailed out all of those people. I mean, it shows you that the fix is in.”

“Too big to fail,” he added. “And now, the big hedge funds, they don’t want any real competition. They’re fine if these day traders do as they’re told, you know, do what they’re supposed to do, but when they get ideas of their own, and they bet against Wall Street, well, my gosh, then … they’re a threat, then they need to be shut down. I just think this shows you that just like we’ve got this concentration of power in so many industries — the tech companies, on Wall Street, too, the big banks, the big hedge funds. They don’t want the competition. They want to be in control.”

Follow Trent Baker on Twitter @MagnifiTrent