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Reddit Investor Behind GameStop Stock Memes To Testify In Congress

Imogen Donovan

Published 

Reddit Investor Behind GameStop Stock Memes To Testify In Congress

Featured Image Credit: Paramount Pictures, Google

The United States Congress has requested that the guy credited with causing the unstoppable surge of GameStop's stock price appear in the Capitol Building to testify for his role in the chaos.

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Last week, something utterly inconceivable occurred. GameStop's stock price was plummeting, but it had been falling for some time due to customers' shift from buying in physical stores to purchasing titles on digital platforms, and of course, the pandemic. A group of hedge funds were circling GameStop and had planned to short: meaning that they had borrowed shares and agreed to return these to GameStop, counting on the low price to line their pockets with the difference. The WallStreetBets subreddit found out about their intentions, and then bought a huge volume of GameStop stock, causing its value to soar. As a result, the hedge funds were forced to make a massive loss in order to fulfil their end of the agreement with the banks who had lent them the stock.

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All the while, the average Joes who had invested on the advice of the subreddit were making a lot of money themselves, and some have even paid it forward in an act of rebellion against the hedge funds' greed. We've got a comprehensive guide to who's who and what's what in the battle between Redditors and Wall Street here, by the way. Now, last week's situation was unprecedented. President Joe Biden and his team were known to be analysing the events, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez took to Twitch to explain the government's stance on the mayhem. Essentially, Reddit was shown to have a significant influence on the American stock market, and that's not a sentence any of us expected to be reading in 2021.

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In an interview, US Representative Maxine Waters, who is the Chair of the House Financial Services Committee, said that she wants the key actors in the tussle between Reddit and Wall Street to stand before Congress and testify. Intense. "This hearing is going to be educational. It's going to be a learning experience for everybody," said Waters. "We are going to have all the players-we will have Robinhood [CEO] Vladimir Tenev, I think is his name, we'll have him there. We'll have a young man there from Reddit, his name is Keith Gill, who basically started this mania." Robinhood is the app that people used to buy and sell stock in the chaos, and it actually started blocking users and selling users' GameStop stock without their permission.

The price of GameStop's shares as of February 5th / Credit: Google
The price of GameStop's shares as of February 5th / Credit: Google

"We understand what's being said about Robinhood and why it did what it did in terms of limiting the buying," continued Waters. "We understand that the hedge funds have lost a lot of money. We understand that the shorting is a big issue, and a big conversation. But what a lot of people didn't know about is the short squeeze, and so we're going to learn an awful lot." Gill is the person who motivated the main move against the hedge funds, as a source of certifiable knowledge, being a chartered financial analyst and all. Also, he's not confirmed that he'll turn up in Congress.

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"I have him on my list to be present. I have him on my list," she said. "They have not confirmed all of my list yet, but I want him." Waters is also after a representative for GameStop, though all of these things happened to GameStop and were not facilitated by GameStop. "It's interesting to know and understand, when you have businesses who are now disadvantaged because of the digital age, what they do and how they're trying to turn that around, and I understand that they are working on turning it around, and that there is a real possibility that they could be successful at this. So I want them here too."

Topics: gamestop, News

Imogen Donovan
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