LettersGameStop frenzy: can the new war on Wall Street usher in a fairer financial system?
- Are the “anti-Wall Street” tactics deployed by Reddit users capable of correcting the errors of the capitalist financial system or just pushing it into another death cycle?
“You stand for everything that I hated,” states an open letter drafted by an anonymous user of the subreddit r/WallStreetBets. Ten years after Occupy Wall Street, a new wave of resentment against the capitalist financial system has arisen amid a global public health crisis, but this time, it has gone online.
After more than a decade of quantitative easing following the 2008 financial crisis, stock prices have soared globally. A wider gap between the rich and the poor has fuelled populism, now at its highest level since the late 1930s, according to hedge fund founder Ray Dalio.
But when we take a step back, we may, once again, see another round of revenge, not by the iconoclastic avengers of capitalism but by the implicit supporters of the current system. Are the “anti-Wall Street” tactics deployed by Reddit users capable of correcting the errors of the system or just pushing it into another death cycle? Can we really create a new (alternative) system which not only corrects the errors of the current system, but replaces it at the lowest cost?
04:39
Coronavirus: What impact will the economic fallout from the Covid-19 pandemic have on you?
At the end of the day, what motivates retail investors may essentially be the same as what motivates Wall Street “exploiters”. What drives financial markets is the desire for more. Companies release their earnings every quarter, as an indicator of their performance; bankers, lawyers and financial analysts seek not only higher ratings from those companies but also better end-of-term performance indicators for themselves.