$GME was always going to be a "Revolution That Wasn’t." Almost everyone playing knew it. IMO, it was kind of an exemplifier of postmodernism, used colloquially. All the "beat down hedgies" stuff was just part of the game, just like "fuck the fundamentals" was part of the game. IMO it has had an influence. A neurotic, dramatic lens through which we can look at financial institutions, more abstract economics. What is c…
I think it should started a discussion about some excesses of the stock market. Rich people can look for battered companies and severely profit from their accelerated demise which some people wanted to fight against for once. Out of their own motives for profit or just for fun to be able to at least once stick it to speculators looking for easy profit. That trading was halted and "corrected" proved they had an impact…
If anything, selling short needs to be made easier as it represents an essential corrective. And this ultimately serves the greater good too as it ensures that the price of a stock is correct and investors don't overpay, which will inevitably lead to losses for them. A good recent example of what happens otherwise is Wirecard. In 2019 the German BaFin enacted a ban on short sales in the stock of the company after reports had been published that were essentially accusing them of fraud. In the end, those reports turned out to be true, and the company collapsed less than 18 months later. The stock fell from over EUR 150 to virtually zero and investors lost pretty much everything. They should have listened to the short sellers rather than fight them.
There are also no "easy profits" in short selling. They only make money if they are right. There are people who have been calling for the immediate collapse of Tesla for the last decade or so. Others have been trying to short Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft, because they think that these companies are completely overvalues. Most of these people are probably bankrupt by now.
But GME isn't any of those companies. They are a failing brick and mortar retailer that is boxed in by Steam on one side and Amazon on the other. They have repeatedly attempted to transform the company over the last decade without success. The fact that their plan is to launch some NFT market place, a field in which they have no experience and that is already crowded by established players like OpenSea, demonstrates how much their management is completely out of ideas. And if the shorts make money from the GME stock, it just means they were right.