Welcome to a Citations Needed News Brief. I am Nima Shirazi.

I'm Adam Johnson.

We do these news briefs in between our regularly scheduled full-length episodes when I don't

know we have to talk about GameStop. So that's what's happening today. Of course you

can follow the show on Twitter at Citations.com.

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Needed podcast with Nima Shirazi and Adam Johnson. But Adam, I've been trying to follow the

GameStop story and the only analogy I can possibly try and understand it using is like

the producers. That's the only way. It's like, okay, there's short selling and shit like

that. You do this thing where you expect a thing to crash and then you reap the benefits.

But if it goes the other way, you get screwed. But please, explain a little more about what

we're seeing with GameStop. Then we'll get into what winds up being both sinister and

also funny about the reactions we're seeing to it.

Just to edify our listeners, the basic gist of it is, and this is obviously a huge simplification.

I don't think it's actually that complicated. A lot of people on the left think that

like these things are more complicated than they are. I think some of the minutia can

be, but the general thrust is that certain hedge funds buy a lot of short options, which

is basically, like you said, it's basically betting against the stock by entering a contract,

whether it be a month or something amount of time, whereby you basically wager the stock

will go down or not go up. What happened was that people were privy to that because

these hedge funds did not have the actual monies. They were actually over leverage. They

didn't have actual money to make good on these short stocks if the stock went up. They

...