The Wild West of “Squid Game” [Matthias Clamer/Stone via Getty Images]
Hey Snackers,
The journey to financial freedom is apparently a roller coaster: A California man said he paid off his student loans by eating lunch and dinner at Six Flags for seven years. A $150 annual pass goes a long, long way.
Stocks closed higher after the Fed announced that it’ll begin scaling back its economy-boosting bond buying program this month.
“Squid Game” over... Halloween is past us, but trends based on Netflix's "biggest-ever" new series aren't. A crypto coin called Squid launched last week at $0.01. The “play to earn” currency professed to let buyers play online games based on the South Korean thriller. Three days later, Squid was up 44,100%, to $4.42. As it gained media coverage, Squid soared 23 million percent between October 26 and November 1, hitting nearly $2.9K. Yesterday it crashed to nearly $0.
Cracks in the honeycomb... There were red flags: a typo-ridden Squid website (“frist game,” “need pay the ticket”) and a leadership team that didn't exist on Google or LinkedIn — like: CEO Kevin Sam, "Founder of Squid Game." (BTW: Netflix reportedly said it was not affiliated with the coin). But Squid isn’t the only parody coin that’s surged recently:
It's a cautionary coin tale… Crypto markets and exchanges lack the controls and fraud protections that the stock market has. But SEC Chairman Gary Gensler wants the “Wild West” of crypto to be regulated in the same way the SEC oversees securities like stocks and bonds. While regulation could take years, the Squid debacle highlights the unique risk of investing in crypto without conducting due diligence.
Hardcover kind of day… The Justice Department is eyeing yet another antitrust crackdown. Yesterday the DOJ filed to block publisher Penguin Random House from buying rival Simon & Schuster from ViacomCBS, a $2.2B deal announced last year.
Trust-bustin’s back… In July, Biden warned businesses across healthcare, tech, agriculture, and banking of plans to put an end to anticompetitive practices. But since then enforcement has been uneven. The DOJ blocked American Airlines and JetBlue from merging to form an airline with a 24% market share, but other mergers have sailed through:
Not all antitrusts are created equal… Regulators can crack down on airlines and publishers with the same anti-monopoly rules they’ve used to prevent mega-mergers for decades, while more omniscient businesses like Big Tech have been harder to tackle. But Big Tech is poised to face increasing antitrust pressure. Numerous bills have been proposed to curb Big Tech’s dominance, including a bipartisan one in October aiming to prevent mega-platforms like Amazon, Apple, and Google from favoring their own products over those from third parties.
Authors of this Snacks own: Dogecoin and Bitcoin, and shares of Apple, Netflix, Google, Uber, Tesla, Amazon, CVS, Roku, and Match
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