- White House press secretary Jen Psaki said the Treasury and others are “monitoring the situation” with GameStop.
- The company’s stock has risen more than 1,200% recently, after the Redditors collectively decided to buy.
- “It is a good reminder that the stock market is not the only measure of the health of our economy,” said Psaki.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Wednesday that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is “monitoring the situation” around GameStop-related changes in the stock market.
“Our team, our economic team, including Secretary Yellen and others, are monitoring the situation,” said Psaki at a news conference. “It is a good reminder that the stock market is not the only measure of the health of our economy. It does not reflect how the middle and working class families are doing.”
Yellen said the new Treasury team, led by Yellen, the Treasury’s first secretary, is typically the unit charged with answering questions regarding the U.S. stock market.
You can watch the video, posted by Bloomberg, below.
—Bloomberg Quicktake (@Quicktake) January 27, 2021
The White House declined to comment further in response to Insider’s request.
The comment was made in response to a question from a reporter about concerns about the stock market, which is recovering from a frenzy caused by a group of redditors. As Ben Gilbert of Insider explains, a 2 million-member Reddit forum called Wall Street Bets is behind the skyrocketing Gamestop stock, which has soared 1,200% in recent weeks.
The Redditors collectively decided to buy more shares of Gamestop after experts predicted that the company, which had been struggling a lot in 2019, was doomed. GameStop, whose business model revolves around the dying video game industry, was somewhat saved during the pandemic, when people sought entertainment in their homes.
Amid the turmoil, the r / WallStreetBets Reddit forum appeared to be down for a brief period on Wednesday morning. The online trading platforms of Vanguard, TD Ameritrade and Charles Schwab also suffered disruptions, with thousands of users reporting problems with DownDetector. TD Ameritrade told Insider that the problems were “due to the sheer volume.”