Gamestop Giddiness

There isn’t many issues that attracts the giddiness of the entire media establishment as the Gamestop stock rise. Even for some journalists, in and outside the financial press, giving a bloody nose to hedge funds is a cause to be celebrated. It’s a spectacle that unites the vast majority of society.

Yet once the event settles down, a moral panic will ensue, seeds of which we’re already seeing develop amid the excitement. While financial types refrain from speaking publicly to protect their reputation and a wider awareness that anything they say will not be received well by the public, it is left to the media class to make the convoluted moral justifications.

The argument is that these people don’t know what they are doing, that their actions are divorced from any technical analysis of the company’s prospects, and that ultimately a lot of people will lose their money. The analysis is fine, but such a conclusion would lead to a reexamination of the entire financial industry. It’s perhaps why in this interview with Chamath Palihapitiya, all the journalist can do is repeat these points, remain steadfast in their horror at anyone justifying this behaviour.

To them they cling onto theory, and don’t see the contradictory reality. Hedge funds are the free market regulating itself, weeding out corruption and keeping in check speculators. But this is less and less the case (notwithstanding Wirecard), while governments in both the US and UK continue quantitive easing programs and maintain historic low interest rates to stimulate economies, which benefit only the financial class. Where is the logic in unprofitable companies seeing their stock soar. To ordinary people it makes no sense.

What the Gamestop phenomenon does is expose this logic, destroying an entire worldview for journalists who oddly buy into it. And of course why they do is a mystery when they don’t make nearly the same money and are truly not invited.

Truly, what scares the pundit and financial class is organisation from below. That an incoherent group on a message board, defined by its anarchy, is able to make such an impact scares them. The “bros” that they perceive the Reddit users to be are an anathema to good, liberal society — that their alleged crimes of hate speech puts them in the same group as the rabble as that stormed the Capitol. It’s a mob defined by their irrationality and extremist politics. A group to be eradicated, not celebrated.

For the rest of us, there is a lesson in organising. To bring together those with the same interests cuts across gender and racial divides. A group of those who have felt helpless before now feel strength for the first time. The stories of those paying off student loans and vet bills warms the heart. They’ve seized back control of their lives.

Ultimately, it will crash down. It’s a moment not a movement. But the Occupy Wall St movement, morphed into the Bernie Sanders campaign. In the UK, the Labour Party was headed up by its mot left-wing leader in history and was not far away from power. Each failure is a lesson, and the masses are failing better each time.