I'm Brian Lerer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday, January 28th.

So do you understand the game's stop Wall Street hysteria yet? I sure don't. So we've asked Washington Post business reporter Hannah

Denham to come on and explain it to us. Listeners, you can help to or ask any question you have at

646-4-3-5-72-80. Hi, Hannah, thanks for joining us for this. Welcome to WNYC.

Hi, thank you so much for having me.

So let's start at sort of the beginning, GameStop, the brick and mortar game store chain that's been losing money,

and AMC movie theaters at a time when there basically are no movie theaters, and also BlackBerry,

who even remembers BlackBerryberries from before the iPhone era,

all these questionable stocks are surging because of something having to do with the social media website, Reddit.

Can you pick it up from there?

Yes, definitely. So for GameStop, the start of the company's January rally, where we've seen most of the games within the past month, that rally can really be traced back to August when a co-founder of Pet Supply Company, Chui disclosed, he had a major stake in the company. That picked up the notice of a lot of Wall Street hedge funds and short sellers who are

investors that plan to profit from the company's fall.

But a message board on Reddit called Wall Street Betts took notice, and they decided to really

propel the GameStop stock and later AMC stock forward. And they view this as

sort of a financial democratized rebellion against institutional Wall Street. So what happened is

that propelled the stock. And now these original short sellers on Wall Street are having to purchase

even more shares at

its laided prices to stay ahead of the losses.

So that's why we see both stocks as well as now BlackBerry and a couple other companies

rising at just like at just incredible rates.

You quote Anthony Scaramucci.

Yes, that Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump advisor now a Trump critic, but in real life, Anthony Scaramucci, yes, that Anthony Scaramucci, the former Trump advisor now a Trump

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