The attention of the world is riveted on the meteoric rise of the GameStop stock, which has risen more than 20 times since the start of 2021.
This is due to a campaign organised by ordinary investors on the subreddit WallStreetBets to buy up GameStop stock and options.
The particular firm was not chosen by chance – it had long been thought to be a dying company, used by big hedge funds to make easy money from selling its shares. But when they started to rise rapidly, financiers had to urgently close short positions, incurring heavy losses.
Several large Wall Street hedge funds found themselves on the verge of bankruptcy and demanded urgent financial support from banks and financial regulators. Their total losses are estimated at billions of dollars, while ordinary investors on reddit have made many millions.
The liberal press immediately called it “Trumpism”. After all, the goal of the campaign was not just to make money, but to do as much damage as possible to financial institutions, for which none of them has much sympathy.
Of course, WallStreetBets moderators have traditionally been accused of pandering to “white nationalism” and extremism. The main subreddit discord was temporarily removed, and access to the WallStreetBets site itself was restricted several times by Reddit censors.
The catastrophic crisis of confidence in all institutions in the US has not left financial institutions unaffected. The Fed’s uncontrolled money issue has led to the rise of cryptocurrencies. And the artificial containment of markets from any downturns has made the strategy of insanely gambling on asset growth to attack hedge funds popular.
Even though the Trump era is over, the populist sentiment in society has not disappeared. And it is now directed at all the institutions of power that have converged under Biden into one monolithic system – the political regime in the White House and Congress, Wall Street and Silicon Valley.
Malek Dudakov