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The Battle of GameStop
What the battle of GameStop has brought into light is that democracy in financial markets is just a myth: whoever controls the valves, controls the flow. The market-making and brokerage markets in the United States are heavily oligopolistic markets in which market-makers and brokers extract huge rents from the retail traders. Although the retail traders involved in the battle appear unaware of what they did, they brought these markets to a near collapse, which the oligopolists managed to stop.
What the battle of GameStop has brought into light is that democracy in financial markets is just a myth: whoever controls the valves, controls the flow. The market-making and brokerage markets in the United States are heavily oligopolistic markets in which market-makers and brokers extract huge rents from the retail traders. Although the retail traders involved in the battle appear unaware of what they did, they brought these markets to a near collapse, which the oligopolists managed to stop. Theirs is neither a revolution nor Occupy Wall Street, but a novel form of collective action expected to continue.
To summarise the GameStop debacle, on which there are already at least five movies and two television shows in the works as of writing,1 let us first explain what short selling is.
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