American life has been particularly bizarre as of late, so maybe none of us should be particularly gobsmacked by the week’s shenanigans on Wall Street — more weird stuff in a weird country. Still, for those who don’t spend much time studying the ins and outs of our financial system, the roller-coaster ride that Redditors have taken us on in the past few days with the wildly fluctuating stock prices of companies like GameStop requires some unpacking.

Doug Henwood is longtime Jacobin contributor and one of the Left’s foremost experts on our miserable financial system. He appeared on the Daily Show yesterday, talking to Trevor Noah about the recent events on Wall Street and the lies the wealthy tell about the stock market.

“All this image that Wall Street likes to cultivate about itself — that it’s rational, and it’s allocating capital efficiently and all that — it’s just nonsense. It’s not doing any of those things,” Henwood tells Noah. “That sense that a lot of people have that this is all a bit of a racket is completely accurate.”

You can read Henwood’s piece on these events, “The GameStop Bubble Is a Lesson in the Absurdity and Uselessness of the Stock Market,” here.