I'm not sure if this is supposed to be posted here but I'm not sure this would be welcome in c/wallstreetbets (lmao) either. It's just sad and dispiriting. Not really gonna say more about this because it's been pretty draining tbh.
Also, before someone says "well I don't think it's WRONG to talk about this, and I don't think it's praxis, and y'know I had to pay rent and spent some money on this and I just like laughing at Melvin eating shit and...." cool, I'm not talking about you, you know which people I am talking about.
"As an example, take a situation involving four investors. Annie owns shares of GameStop, and Annie and her broker have an agreement that allows the broker to lend Annie's shares to short-sellers. It lends them to Bob, who subsequently sells those borrowed shares short in hopes that GameStop's share price will fall.
An investor named Chris ends up buying those borrowed shares from Bob. However, Chris has no way of knowing that those shares have been borrowed from Annie. To Chris, they're just like any other shares.
More importantly, if Chris has the same kind of agreement, then Chris's broker can lend out those shares to yet another investor. Diane, another GameStop bear, can borrow those shares and sell them short.
In this example, the same shares end up getting borrowed and sold twice. The short interest volume these transactions add to the total is twice the number of shares actually involved. You can therefore see that if this happened throughout the market, total short interest would eventually exceed the number of shares outstanding and approach 200%"
Yes that is nuts. And yes capitalism is a big meme.
If they literally had to buy every stock in the market twice, it still wouldn't be worth close 70 billion. Someone posted the link to the article they thought was showing they were losing 70 billion, and it was about loss at short positions this year in general, not just due to the GameStop squeeze. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-retail-trading-shortbets-idUSKBN29X1SW