Re: <nettime> GameStop Never Stops

An addition to Bodo's (IMHO) excellent analysis, written by the economic journalist Jens Berger on the German left-wing political blog "Nachdenkseiten" ("Reflection Pages"):

"[...] There are certainly some shrewd strategists among those amateur speculators; people who early on grasped the momentum that had been unleashed and, at the peak of the speculative wave, quickly cashed out selling the shares they had bought at a low price. For the majority of amateur speculators, however, this is not the case. What is often forgotten is that a stock trade always requires a buyer and a seller. This leads to the overlooked question: Who did sell the shares to the hedge funds and the hobby speculators during the turmoil? Were it professionals like ['Big Short' investor Michael] Burry, [Elon] Musk and the Winkelvoss brothers? Or Reddit power users who masterminded the whole coup? The whole thing literally smells of market manipulation and one can only hope that the circumstantial evidence will now be investigated.

One thing is certain: Now many hobby speculators have shares in an ailing company in their portfolio, which they acquired at a grotesquely overpriced price. Gamestop's sales have plummeted 40% in the last three years, the company recently posted a net loss of $140 million, has only $330 million in equity and nearly $700 million in net debt. If the loss continues, the company would have to file for bankruptcy in two and a half years. And at the latest, when the hype is over and the first hobby speculators ask themselves what the fair value of Gamestop stock actually is, the bubble will finally burst and book profits will turn into real losses. Then Reddit users will also realize that their victory was a Pyrrhic victory and perhaps ask themselves who actually sold them the shares at this exorbitantly overpriced price back then.

# BlackRock always wins

Even during the gold rush in the American West, it wasn't the prospectors who made the really big money, but the traders and outfitters. In all the speculation with short selling, there are also market participants who always win - whether prices are rising or falling. And these are the ones who manage large blocks of shares and lend them to the short sellers for handsome fees. In the case of Gamestop, it's primarily an old acquaintance: BlackRock.

Through its index funds and ETFs, BlackRock manages more than 12% of Gamestop shares, making it number two among the largest individual shareholders behind the financial group Fidelity, which manages almost 14% of the shares. In third place, by the way, comes Vanguard, another giant of the financial industry. It is true that BlackRock and Vanguard, as managers, are not allowed to speculate with the shares themselves within the framework of index funds. Without these giants, however, short selling would not be possible either, since hedge funds ultimately have to borrow the stocks they speculate against from someone who actually owns or manages them. And it is an open secret that BlackRock and Vanguard can only charge their clients such comparatively low fees because one of their main sources of income are such side deals with hedge funds; side deals, mind you, which are a license to print money as long as there is someone to cover the hedge funds' incurred losses.

And in this case, it's once again the taxpayer. Only last March, the central banks had rescued, with billions of U.S. dollars, exactly those hedge funds which now once more placed the wrong bets in their speculations. In this way, the state not only secures speculation, but also acts as a kind of "default insurance" of last resort for BlackRock, Vanguard and Co. Without this taxpayer guarantee, BlackRock and Co. could not have reached the size with which they now dominate and control corporate capitalism.

# Once again, the necessary lessons are not being learned

Now "finance" is discussing the Gamestop farce like a startled bunch of chickens. As is usually the case, however, the proposals, demands and even criticism are going in completely the wrong direction. Once again, calls are being made to ban short selling altogether. Why? If speculation on rising prices is allowed, speculation on falling prices must also be allowed; if only to create a corrective for fraudulent upward price manipulation, as the [German Enron-equivalent] case of Wirecard perfectly shows. Not short selling, but the entire speculation on the stock market needs to be strictly regulated and decelerated - both upwards and downwards"

Translated from:
https://www.nachdenkseiten.de/?p=69425

-F

blog: https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
bio: http://floriancramer.nl

On Wed, Feb 3, 2021 at 5:01 PM Balazs Bodo <bodonospam2@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

may I be the grumpy old man here?
I am a tad tired to be fascinated by the latest madness that emerges from the intersection of a US technology companies running amok, a US society which i see struggling with deep political, social, economic problems, and the psyche of mostly US citizens, also showing disturbing signs of distress and confusion.

Yes, I agree, on an abstract level, it is fascinating to see congress members and presidents recruiting flat-earthers, non-voters, q anon shamans to carry out a coup, as much it is fascinating to see Musk mobilizing anonymous reddit crowds to do meme investments with an app that makes money by selling the transaction log to wall street firms, but it is also not fascinating, or no more than seeing a sick homeless, drug addict man dying alone on the curbside.

Yes, I know, I'm invoking the language of health and sickness, madness and normality here, but i cannot escape the feeling, that we are seeing here is not an instance of a political/economic revolt, or social mobilization, (or as one friend put it, class struggle), but the symptoms of a dysfunctional social/economic order, more akin to the institutionally manufactured opioid epidemic than to the long history of revolutions. And, I would not call the opioid epidemic 'fascinating', the same way I would not call the ADHD epidemic fascinating.

I think how we look at such phenomena matters, and, as was the case with trump, it is easy to slip into the sports spectator /commentator position: there is DRAMA! there are STARS! the stakes are HIGH! $$$$! There are teams to CHEER! Maybe. But it is also a deeply, deeply sad thing to watch, requires lots of intellectual, emotional labor to engage with, and ultimately, there is no catharsis, just the tragedy of the reproduction of the causes which produce these symptoms in the first place.

:(

b.-

On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 7:19 PM Sam Dwyer <hellosamdwyer@gmail.com> wrote:
Two days ago an otherwise sensible friend, a political organizer, earnestly and then angrily tried to convince me that purchasing stock in Gamestop was somehow striking a blow against capitalism.

I was and remain very perplexed at how people could believe such a thing. ONE WEIRD TRICK THAT BANKS HATE is putting money into your brokerage account and purchasing stocks? Surely not. This friend then admitted that people who invested now probably weren't going to make money. "So," I asked, "by investing now, and letting other people take profits, you are supporting a movement? Like a heroes relief fund?" Yes.

This is a particularly dumb front in a just war.

Given that $GME is presently imploding, with its value down -55% for the day, I hope there won't be too many casualties amongst the revolutionary cadres; sacrificed, as they have been so often in the past, in the service of cynical agendas. At least (to my knowledge) the white supremacists haven't written thinkpieces portraying their participation in a get-rich-quick scheme as virtuous. It is also worth mentioning that there are also no doubt plenty of hedge funds who took the opposite, winning side of Melvin Capitals crowded short trade. But if they are winning, they are being smart and not crowing about it.

The Gamestop Saga will flare out as a cultural scrying glass soon, but there are many more, and profoundly consequential implications behind Felix's astute point that this is "all about money and the recognition, after a decade of quantitative easing and crypto bubbles, that money is somehow meaningless." Part of this sensation may be the emotional experience of inflation, and a changing relationship to money as a substance, as it continues to physically dematerialize. Part of it may also be that Americans have now seen how easy it is for the government to flip a switch and send us a check.

This last part seems to be popular.

On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 8:54 AM Florian Cramer <flrncrmr@gmail.com> wrote:
GameStop checks all boxes of 'populism' as it has been defined by political scientists Jan-Werner Müller and Cas Mudde, namely as a revolt of "the good people" against "the corrupt elites". (I am less sure whether it would also check the boxes of populism as defined by Laclau/Mouffe).

As you pointed out, Felix, it's "hard to say" what the politics of GameStop are beyond such a diagnosis. Its orchestration on Reddit involved white suprematists [ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/jan/31/market-is-rigged-in-favour-of-rich-as-gamestop-fiasco-reveals ], and it is heavily being pushed in right-extremist Telegram channels. One also shouldn't forget that it's the creation of a speculative bubble like Bitcoin, albeit a more nihilistic one, and maybe also a (IMHO naive and misguided) assumption that stock ownership is 'good' capitalism while short selling is toxic capitalism.

-F

--
blog: https://pod.thing.org/people/13a6057015b90136f896525400cd8561
bio: http://floriancramer.nl

On Tue, Feb 2, 2021 at 1:16 PM Felix Stalder <felix@openflows.com> wrote:

I find the GameStop saga endlessly fascinating, on so many levels.

For one, it's a fitting continuation of the year of American discontent,
that started with #BLM, continued with #StopTheSteal, and reached now
Wall Street with #Gamestop. Politically, these movements are, of course,
very different. The first reacting to deep historical, systemic
injustice and violence, the second bought into a political lie and the
third one, well, that's hard to say.

But all three express, in their own way, a belief, shared by large
segments of the population, that "the system" -- the institutions of
policing, democracy and the financial system -- are fundamental rigged
against them, and that they have to do something against it, even at
considerable personal risk. If you followed all three over the year,
even only superficially, you got a crash course in institutional
critique on an epic scale.

Here's pretty good segment from hill.tv, a relatively respectable
Washington outlet, that makes pretty much this argument:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zTT4it_f7Jc&feature=youtu.be

In terms of GameStop, I think a good starting point is to assume that
there are predominantly bad-faith actors involved, that everything
expressed is part of an agenda, that may, or may not, be in line with
what is expressed. Additionally, we are in an environment that is fully
artificial, made up of ultimately arbitrary, but consequential rules. If
you are a deeply immersed gamer, or belief that we are living in a
virtual simulation, as people like Musk apparently do, then you are
right at home.

That doesn't mean that this is not political. It's a lot of things at
the same time. An insider-game between billionaires, a populist revolt,
a get-rich-quick-scheme, total market failure, and the free-markets
fully functioning. It's ultra cynical and naive, deeply individualistic,
and full of expressions of solidarity. It's deadly serious and hugely
entertaining. It's all about money and the recognition, after a decade
of quantitative easing and crypto bubbles, that money is somehow
meaningless. It expresses itself in spreadsheets and memes, and, no
doubt, soon also in congressional hearings.

While I don't expect this one event to have immediate, dramatic
consequences, I expect this to simmer on for a long time and light other
fires, in unexpected places.

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