How do we know what 'the public' is cheering? Has there been any reputable sources of this?

On one hand, the rise of meme stocks is shining light that one of the central conceits of capitalism is wrong (i.e. that the stock market isn't a good arbiter of the value of companies).

But as a member of the public, I'm concerned about what happens when the meme stocks come crashing back to earth. When that happens institutional investors will overreact, doom and gloom will reign, and CEOs of public companies will use that to lay off people and cut worker benefits.

The common person always loses when bubbles burst.

"The common person always loses when bubbles burst."

That is a tautology, because you define the "common person" as the person who loses.

I'm sure there were people who made good money in the 2008 housing bubble. Didn't they all live like kings for a while, because they could borrow arbitrary sums against their houses?

Similarly, some people may make good money on that GameStop thing now.

The "common people" who didn't participate in this will probably never even notice. At most they'll notice that their favorite shopping mall is closing, but that is part of a larger trend. And they can now shop on Amazon instead, so their quality of life probably remains the same or gets improved.

Actually, I never defined the common person. Because I felt it's pretty obvious.

The common person is the majority of Americans who live paycheck-to-paycheck and don't invest in the market.

Those who don't participate will be negatively impacted if this causes another recession, which is likely as investors get spooked by another bubble burst. Which means standard of living, job benefits, and salaries will continue to stagnate.

This also ignores the fact that we've moved from guaranteed pensions to 401ks, which are heavily dependent on hedge funds. If hedge funds lose their shirts, they'll get a bailout from the government because we didn't learn our lesson about too big to fail last time. Which will mean government austerity in other areas, typically starting in social welfare programs.

401ks, given their rules, are not reliant on hedge funds, unless you expert hedge funds to be any good at influencing pricing in the long term

If there was no meme-stockery happening, Gamestop would have gone bust and everyone that works there would have been laid off. That's what the whole short strategy was intended to do, bleed them dry just like Toys R Us.

In a crazy way this is probably saving a lot more jobs than it's jeopardizing.

Why would GameStop have gone bust? Even if GameStop stock would trade at zero, the company still exists until it runs out of money and declares bankruptcy, which is independent of its stock price.

In this case, it's not really saving any jobs, since GameStop employees (excluding higher ranked employees) probably don't have any part of their compensation that's stock based.

Toys R Us was a leveraged buyout, which is definitely a much more ethically dubious strategy, and that can cause jobs to be lost. This won't cause any jobs at GameStop to be lost, although there probably will be some unhappy traders and people left holding bags of GameStop stock.

If GameStop trades below book value, then someone could do a takeover, sell all the assets and make a profit.

Good point.

Out of curiosity, has that actually happened to a public stock? I'd assume the minority shareholders would have standing for a lawsuit if someone were to do a hostile takeover of a stock and liquidate the assets of the company.

Afaik it used to be popular in the 70s and 80s. It’s sometimes called “Corporate Raid” [0]. In the movie Wall Street, Gordon Gecko wants to buy the airline to sell it for parts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_raid#History

Bankruptcy is not independent from the stock price. If your company goes bankrupt, its shares are voided.

You're right, what I meant is that the share price doesn't affect the finances of the company (eg. a company that sells widgets makes the same amount of money whether their stock is worth $1 or $100000). As you point out, the share price should in theory reflect the value of the company (bankrupt company -> share price of $0), but a fluctuating stock price doesn't really change the value of the company itself (excluding shares that it owns, obviously).

> one of the central conceits of capitalism is wrong (i.e. that the stock market isn't a good arbiter of the value of companies)

The "central conceit" is not that the market is a "good arbiter" of the value of a company. Just that it's the least bad one.

The central conceit of every alternative to capitalism is that there's such a thing as a singular, coherent definition of "the value of a company" and that it's consistently, accurately measurable by some central authority.