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"“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. On January 22, users of r/WallStreetBets initiated a short squeeze on the video game retailer GameStop , pushing up the stock price after hedge funds publicly predicted its decline. A few days later, the stock price had risen almost 190 times from its record low. 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. Social media-amplified and decentralised protest movements have been common in recent years, with online communication shaping collective action. Thus, it is not surprising that current stock market events are inspired by the notion that Wall Street is simply a paradise for greedy exploiters. 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? 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. If this seemingly silly online prank against the modern capitalist financial system leaves any legacy, it will not be how the US government subsequently adjusts policies, but whether it can be a trigger for an alternative mechanism. We need a new Robin Hood who can save the poor without robbing the rich. As philosopher Slavoj Zizek said during Occupy Wall Street: “… carnivals come cheap. What matters is the day after, when we will have to return to normal lives. Will there be any changes then?” Ricky Fu Kwong-or, postgraduate student, City University of Hong Kong"
<https://www.scmp.com/comment/letters/article/3120184/gamestop-frenzy-can-new-war-wall-street-usher-fairer-financial>