Charlie Munger says it’s ‘really stupid to have a culture which encourages [so] much gambling in stocks’

By Mark DeCambre

So says Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, in a Wednesday interview with Yahoo Finance .

The famously plain-spoken Munger made his comments in reference to the GameStop short selling chaos that gripped Wall Street a month ago, as an army of individual investors congregating on social-media platforms like Reddit and Discord, rattled the broader market by upending the short bets of professional investors.

The episode resulted in a hearing last week before the House Financial Services Committee, where the head of the popular trading platform Robinhood defended a decision in late January to temporarily restrict trading in so-called “meme stocks,” including GameStop /zigman2/quotes/203755179/composite GME -1.12% and AMC Entertainment Holdings /zigman2/quotes/200235402/composite AMC -5.76% . GameStop exploded back into the news Wednesday as trading in the stock, which doubled in value on the day, was repeatedly halted .

Markets eventually bounced back from the late January saga, but the epic short squeeze momentarily rattled their bullish demeanor, sending the Dow Jones Industrial Average /zigman2/quotes/210598065/realtime DJIA +0.48% , the S&P 500 /zigman2/quotes/210599714/realtime SPX +0.36% and the Nasdaq Composite /zigman2/quotes/210598365/realtime COMP +0.10% indexes to their sharpest weekly declines since October.