Hilariously no longer feels topical.
Dear Wall Street Bets,
I am FURIOUS at having to wrap my poor little liberal arts brain around economics at your behest. I’m like every other reasonable and too-online person, willing to engage with all sorts of topics in the service of piling on something ridiculous and hilarious. Netflix restarted The Troubles? Sign me up. A wax reimagining of Marty McFly as a 45 year old divorcee? I’m absolutely there. But how dare you, HOW DARE YOU, make me relive freshman economics and learn what the stock market actually does.
Did you know until now I was blissfully ignorant of hedge funds? As someone who is one more online bank security breach away from moving to the woods and stuffing my mattress, I had absolutely no desire to know how deeply the basis of western economy was a totally made up gambling game played by frat boys that then had to get disrupted by different, slightly nerdier frat boys. I was a perfectly capable whole person in my own right before I knew what shorting a stock was. I can never go back. I am ruined.
I had to ask my friends to explain each concept to me as though I were five. I spent two hours asking questions like “but why don’t people just buy stocks themselves” and “shouldn’t it be easier to sell stocks when they’re low, who is buying them when they’re high?” I’ve had to read the words “meme market” unironically as part of a news story. GameStop became relevant again. The sacrifices I have made will stay with me for eons.
Look, we all agree that money is a sham. The people in charge will do anything they can to hoard it and stay in charge, and any mass act of robbing from the rich to give to the…almost as rich is going to be immediately shut down. This whole exercise is merely proof of what most of us already know. And yet, did I really have to learn about buy-ins and commision free trade-ins to relish the anxious tears of a Wall Street investor seeing his scam falling apart in his hands?
Now they’re telling me AMC is in deep trouble. Now they’re saying it’s set for years. Nothing makes sense, nothing has meaning, the universe is full of unknowable gods and I, a mere English major, a pawn in the games of forces beyond my ken. On top of this, I have to watch Mad Money (that’s still on, right?) and almost know what’s going on.
If I’m going to be refreshing the Dow Jones every five minutes now there better be a good payoff. I’ve never studied so much for schadenfreude in my entire life. What’s next, exploiting quantum physics to transform accelerated particles into bitcoin? Enough’s enough. If you’re going to pull stunts like these in the future I respectfully request that ahead of time you release a syllabus of relevant explainers or at the very least, a beginner’s guide.
Best wishes,
Lena
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