Policy Punchline

Steven Kelts is a Lecturer at Princeton University’s Politics Department and University Center for Human Values. A historian of political thought, he is now teaching a seminar titled “Money, Markets, and Morals.” In this interview, Prof. Kelts explains the recent saga of GameStop trades, its connections with historical market fluctuations, and the important normative considerations about market fairness and regulation posed by great intellectuals like John Locke, Bertrand Harcourt, Milton Friedman, and Karl Polanyi. r/WallStreetBets, a forum hosted on Reddit that is described as 4chan meeting Bloomberg Terminal, was the birthplace of the Gamestop Short Squeeze. What started off as a brilliant way of organizing retail traders to drive up stock prices quickly evolved into a nation-wide political debate posed as a “proletariat revolution” by retail traders against the Wall Street establishment. We trace all the way back to works by John Locke and the Medieval times when identifiable features of modern markets