“The story of apes post-squeeze is the story of a bunch of people standing around a trashed hotel room at 5:00 am asking when the party’s going to start.”
… I made an immediate note of this searing burn purely for the language, but as I’ve listened to more of the video I’ve come to better appreciate the story Dan Olson is building here. In the first part of the video, where he’s describing the mechanics of the Gamestop squeeze, I felt like it was strictly redundant with say Matt Levine’s coverage, except that Money Stuff was coming out while GME was happening and Folding Ideas didn’t hit it until two years later. (“Strictly redundant with Matt Levine” doesn’t mean bad content, or just didn’t feel new to me.)
But a keystone of Levine’s whole persona is the air of a perpetually bemused technician just relating these insane stories he happens to be bombarded with; part of the whole move is shrugging his shoulders in incomprehension of the motivations of the actors, the better to appreciate the aesthetics of securities fraud or loopholes in CDS contracts or what have you.
Whereas Olson is a critic at heart. His goal is to understand the stories that animate the whole thing; that requires some elucidation of the thing, occasionally in depth, but mostly in service of the stories. I’m not through the video, but I think it’s going to be a richer analysis than Levine’s, in the end.
Currently listening: LITTLE EVE, by Catriona Ward, read by Carolyn Bonnyman.