Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance
By Chris DeMuth, Sifting The World
With many of our traditional institutions in shambles and elites in disrepute, nihilistic celebrities have emerged to make a mockery of their field. Their awfulness is the point. It gives their fans permission to lower the bar. Many examples are in trivial fields that degrade our culture, but not in ways all that salient to me. Grotesque, morbidly obese and not always female contestants win beauty contests. The ugliness is the point and it is intended to repel. But I don’t care that much about beauty contests and would have hardly noticed if a beautiful woman won.
The personal peccadillos of populist political candidates up and down the ballot are part of their appeal. The worse they behave, the more fun their fans have in offending their hated elite rivals. Ugliness replaces beauty. Lowness invades high office. They are intended to insult the medium and the worse the contestant the better the point is enunciated.
Financial nihilism crescendoed during the late ZIRPy era overlapping with Covid hysteria in early 2021. The value of money was obscured by its cost hitting zero. This inflated everything from NFTs to meme stocks. This was exacerbated by stimulus checks, “stimmies” that were treated like fun money by their recipients. These hit accounts while most sports were shut down, so people, especially young men, couldn’t test their luck with sports betting.
This was the perfect environment for fermenting a short squeeze such as GameStop (GME) in January of that year. The move was animated by an animus against hedge funds short the stock (combined with an enthusiastic ignorance of all aspects of valuing companies and shorting stocks. The retail holders bidding it up even created this second language of financial terms barely recognizable to professionals).
But June 2024 has many differences. Retail investors are still app based, but Robinhood (HOOD) has dialed back some of the hysteria. Free trades still make the process seem less weighty than when there’s even a trivial cost, but they eliminated the confetti graphics when a trade is placed. GME doesn’t have a particularly high short interest.
Stimmy recipients have long since blown through that money and far more with the rampant defrauding of the Paycheck Protection Program (“PPP”). Most importantly, money now has a cost. Robinhood, the very online trading app that fueled the hysteria, now offers Gold members 5% APY. That means that there’s a tangible opportunity cost for wild speculation over prudent saving.
GameStop’s top promoter, Keith Gill, presented his thoughts on GameStop yesterday:
Don’t spend the better part of an hour watching this. There is zero substance and the style is drug addled and mentally ill. That is why over 2.2 million people watched. His fans want to take down the status of work, intelligence, and logic. They want this to be a mockery. He gives them what they want. The stock is still up, trading at a multiple of what it is worth. This is all part of the same nihilistic culture whose fans want to live action role play the destruction and meaningless they feel in their own lives. It has not yet run its course. But logical people are starting to poke their heads up a bit. We took it all for years — low is high, men are women, money is limitless...(READ THIS FULL ARTICLE HERE).
