When will a stock exchange suspend trading because of a short squeeze?

Question

I don't completely understand why the NYSE suspended Piggly Wiggly Co., because I don't think the NYSE suspends stocks for short sellign in general? I boldened the key sentence below. Will the NYSE do the same for GameStop [GME] or other short squeezed stocks?

The original article printed this as a single paragraph, but I added paragraphs to make it more readable.

The New Yorker, June 6, 1959 P. 128

ANNALS OF FINANCE about Clarence Saunders of Memphis, who in 1919, founded the Piggly Wiggly Stores, a chain of retail self-service markets situated mostly in the South & West, with headquarters in Memphis. Saunders is remembered on Wall St. as the last man who engineered a real corner in a nationally traded stock. By 1922 the stores had flourished so that its shares were listed on the N.Y. Stock Exchange.

When a group of bears began selling Piggly Wiggly short to force the price of the stock down, Saunders began a buying campaign to support the price of the stock in order to protect his own investment & that of other Piggly Wiggly stockholders. He supplemented his own funds with a loan of about ten million dollars from a group of bankers. His buying campaign was an attempt at a corner. The stock went up wildly, reaching a high of 124. At this point the Exchange suspended further trading & postponed the short sellers' delivery deadline. This resulted in eventual bankruptcy for Saunders & he was finally forced to step out of the Piggly Wiggly Company.

Saunders came back, however, In 1928 he started a new grocery chain called the Clarence Saunders, Sole Owner of My Name, Stores, Inc. The depression hit these stores in 1930, & they went bankrupt & he was broke again.

After that he started another grocery chair, called the Kedoozle, an electrically operated store. It was found that the machinery was too complex & expensive to operate. In his last years Saunders was working on an even more intricate mechanism - the Foodelectric. It was unfinished when he died in 1953.

By the way, I know this author, John Brooks, wrote a 1969 book Business Adventures that discusses this the Piggly Wiggly market corner in the chapter "The Last Great Corner". But my library doesn't have it.

Answer 1

In general exchanges' business models rely on them being able to provide safe, transparent and liquid markets with the credibility of being trustworthy and honest.

Whilst I myself am very skeptical on the woolly definition that is 'spoofing' there are rules put in place that prevent this, and other kinds of market-manipulation such as insider-dealing.

When an exchange detects 'unusual activity' the typical reaction is to halt trading and investigate. I believe empirical studies have shown that halting a market (so called circuit breakers) have been effective in reducing volatility overall, not least because it sometimes gives operators a chance to reset the parameters on electronic algorithms.

If you detected excessive and extremely unusual activity in a share like GME, whose company fundamentals are unchanged in light of the recent 10x price increase, would you try to prevent this activity? I would. Nokia have even released a statement saying they do not know what is driving their share price, presumably in an effort to maintain some sort or professionalism and avoid becoming a meme stock that other fund managers avoid simply because the volatility becomes too great.

this question is relatively opinion based and should technically be closed