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.