Winning a storytelling contest

One reason to be interested in the stock market is it can become a storytelling contest. Take the story of GameStop. There was a prevailing story, a sad story, that GameStop was Blockbuster all over again. Old mall stores, a dying dinosaur selling product that’s now online.

But then, people stood up and said, that’s not the story of GameStop. The story of GameStop is that yeah, it might need to change, but it’s not dying. It’s healthy. GameStop can live a long time. What’s more, it has real advantages, it just demonstrated some of them last Christmas. With clever thinking and fast action GameStop could succeed. It could even be big.

Then, in a place where people gather and share stories, an even more riveting story arose. A bunch of cocky suits have made arrogant bets on the old story of GameStop. They’re planning to feast on the carcass, as if they don’t have enough to feast on. But guess what. They’re not as smart as they think. There’s something they didn’t plan on. They wrote a check their ass can’t cash. If someone calls ’em on it? They’ll be ruined.

The power of this story became so strong that by now everyone’s heard it. Robinhood (and what story are they trying to tell? You’re out here saying you’re as good as Robin Hood?! Robin Hood, played by Errol Flynn, a Disney fox, Kevin Costner, and Picard?!) whose ball everyone was using had to declare a sudden rule change. Which every child knows is bullshit behavior and unfair.

Is that story true? Does it matter?

At some level there is truth to be faced. There are debts with dates on them and courts and legal power that will enforce them. But the value of GameStop, we’ve now seen, is a story that can be changed very quickly by compelling storytellers. The idea that the correct story is somehow already embedded in the stock price has been proven many times to not always be the case, no matter how many Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel are given suggesting such. (Note who gives that prize, by the way: a central bank, which has a vested interest, in fact its only interest, in maintaining a a steady, stable, version of the story of economics).

Sverges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel winner Robert Schiller didn’t miss this, he wrote a book about the power of stories:

(I’m working my way through it).

Oh and by the way money itself is a kind of story. Ever since 1971 when Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard, money “floats,” money is an act of language, money is based on the story that the US government will honor the words on paper dollars and accept those for debts (which are themselves stories).

So, where does that leave us?

No idea, I’m riveted by the story. Who would add a jot to the GameStop discourse, it’s overwhelming! I can’t even keep up with Matt Levine, a great storyteller about these matters.