Reddit Dukes It Out With Wall Street

A conflict most-fitting of the internet age.

Courtesy of Flickr by Mike Mozart. Licensed under CC BY 2.0.

If the 2008 financial crisis hadn’t already exposed Wall Street for the crooks that they are, a collective of retail traders on the r/WallStreetBets subreddit did so even more flagrantly this last Wednesday. It started out as a meme to momentarily prevent the GameStop stock from being shorted, but it culminated into an ideologically-diverse quasi-proletarian all-out assault on the ivory tower of greed and fraud that is Wall Street, with moderate success.

For the purposes of this analysis, knowing the particular details with which the assault on hedge funds looking to short GameStop stock (which author of the Markets Weekly newsletter Alexis Goldstein speculated might be partially aided by other competing hedge funds) isn’t of pressing importance. What’s been rather interesting is the divergence of perspectives between sympathizers and skeptics, the media and politicians, the rich and the poor, and how the forces of each coalesced into a nigh-unanimous disdain for the way financial institutions in Wall Street conduct themselves, free of consequence for much damage done.