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Di Muzio, Tim

Working Paper GameStop Capitalism. Wall Street vs. The Rally (Part I)

Provided in Cooperation with: The Bichler & Nitzan Archives

Suggested Citation: Di Muzio, Tim (2021) : GameStop Capitalism. Wall Street vs. The Reddit Rally (Part I), The Bichler and Nitzan Archives, Toronto, http://bnarchives.yorku.ca/673/

This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/229951

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GameStop Capitalism Wall Street vs. The Reddit Rally1 PART I Commentary Tim Di Muzio Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Economy University of Wollongong [email protected] 2021

The phrase, ‘there’s a sucker born every minute’ is typically attributed to the American showman, P.T. Barnum and was made infamous since the mid-19th century by gamblers, hucksters and confidence artists (con men). On Wall Street, the ‘sucker’ is supposed to be the ‘dumb money’ retail traders who populate Main Street as evidenced by a long string of capitalist crashes, crises and public money bailouts to the big boys, not to mention the recurrent fraudsters in three piece suits ripping people off like Bernie Madoff. The latter is said to have ‘made-off’ with US$65 billion through a long-running Ponzi scheme – most of it the life savings of his victims (granted they were also wealthy).2 So the saying goes: ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’

But while some claim that there is nothing new under the sun, in an interesting turn of events over the last few day of January 2021, some managers on Wall Street became the ‘unusual suckers’, losing billions of dollars from shorting GameStop (stock

1 I’d like to thank Frances Cowell for her thoughtful comments and suggestions on this piece. 2 Email correspondence with Frances Cowell recounting informal audience discussion of a presentation by Dan DiBartolomeo of Northfield Information Services at a London Quant Spring Seminar in London in May 2009. “The biggest turkey was of course the SEC, which had, for at least ten years, ignored warnings by other market participants that the profits he boasted were infeasible, given prevailing market prices and the strategy he said he was pursuing. Informed sources also have it that, when as much money as possible could be received wreckage, less than half of the investors in the fund came forward to claim their share, suggesting that many decided that recovering their money would not be worth forfeiting their anonymity..... We note also that Madoff surrendered himself to the police, clearly figuring that he would be safer in their hands than anywhere else.” More details on Franc