Over the course of two weeks in January 2021, the stock price for GameStop – the brick-and-mortar video game retailer – rose by a shocking 1,500 percent. Suddenly, a handful of hedge funds who had shorted GameStop’s stock, betting that the stock price would go down, found themselves the victim of what’s called a short squeeze.
Over the past several years, American institutions have faced challenges that have placed an enormous amount of stress and strain on them. Some of those challenges have been emergent phenomenon, while other challenges have been intentionally inflicted by political actors.