Heterodox Economics Newsletter
Issue 275 February 01, 2021 web pdf Heterodox Economics Directory
The stock market rally of the last years has taken an unexpected turn these days, when a coordinated effort of hobby-investors and semi-professionals engaged in a (slightly dubious) reddit-forum managed to corner some professional Wall Street short-sellers by buying shares of GameStop – a retailer for computer games & consoles. To me, this is a somewhat ambivalent phenomenon as many latecomers to the show will probably lose some money. At the same time it is highly interesting to see some rudimentary strategic herd behavior emerge from a public forum largely driven by a variety of emotions. These emotions range from "traditional" animal spirits over 'gambling fevers' a la Dostojewski to the partly desperate hope for challenging a system that is perceived as unfair and unethical.
To me, there is a double irony here: for one, emotions, which are with good reason not considered to be a suitable guide for your investment decisions, serve as a basis for executing a quite rational strategy in a large group, that would not be available to single players due to lack of capital. Here emotions are a core foundation: the lack of individual endowments is compensated by a (surely fragile) informal agreement on cooperation fuelled by emotional commitments. For another, the surge in the GameStop stock prices has led various players to declare this as a case of potential market manipulation that merits investigation, which would impose a double standard as retail investors are actually only copying an established Wall Street strategy (namely this one).
While the second observation is politically revealing (and, admittedly, also quite funny), the first observation is theoretically interesting as it seems somehow truly novel: while to me strategic moves by market makers and herd behavior are key features of modern financial markets (and, hence, unsurprising), I have a hard time finding a historical example for this specific kind of emergent herd behavior, that collectively mimics a strategy that is typically associated with large financial institutions. If reddit facilitates such novelties its (+1) for reddit, no matter what you think about public forums like these in general... ;-)
All the best,
Jakob
PS: We have three new positions for doctoral students in the doctoral school 'Political Economy of Inequaity' at University of Duisburg-Essen (Germany). All details can be found here and below.
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Table of contents
- Call for Papers
- European Journal of Economics and Economic Policies: Special Issue on 'The stock-flow consistent (SFC) approach and theory of the monetary circuit (TMC)'
- 12th Annual Post-Keynesian Economics Society PhD Student Conference (online, May 2021)
- 1st History of Economic Thought Diversity Caucus Online Conference (online, May 2021)
- 24th ESHET Conference 2021: Update (Sofia, Oct. 2021)
- 33rd Annual EAEPE Conference (Naples, Sept. 2021)
- ASSA 2022: ASE Sessions on "The Multiple Facets of Inequality"
- Brazilian Journal of Social and Labour Economics: Special Issue on "Varieties of digitized manufacturing and their impact on production models, work organization and the international division of labour"
- Deadline Extended: 33rd annual conference of The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics (SASE)
- Deadline extended: 42st Annual Meeting of the AFIT Conference 2021 (online, April 2021)
- ILR Review: Conference and Special Issue on "Transnational Employment Relations in the European Union"
- Oldenburg conference on "International Lending of Last Resort in Historical and Theoretical Perspectives" (Oldenburg, Sept. 2021)
- Review of Evolutionary Political Economy: Special Issue on "Agent-based macroeconomics in era of global crises: Innovative policy measures for an adaptive resilient economy"
- Call for Participants
- Institute of Political Economy, Governance, Finance and Accountability (PEGFA) Online Conference on "Inequalities and policy implications after Covid-19" (online, March 2021)
- Center for the History of Political Economy: 2021 Summer Institute (online, June 2021)
- PhD Workshop: "The Political Ecology of Pandemics"
- Rethinking Economics Pluralist Showcase: Stratification Economics (online, Feb. 2021)
- Webinar: What states can do for sustainability transformations? (online, Feb. 2021)
- Conference Papers, Reports, and Podcasts
- Recordings of the 2021 ASSA Conference
- Job Postings
- Carleton University, Canada
- Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, Palestine
- The New School, USA
- University of Bremen, Germany
- Uppsala University, Sweden (1/2)
- Uppsala University, Sweden (2/2)
- Awards
- Call for Submissions: Kurt W. Rothschild Award for Economic Journalism and Research
- Journals
- Accounting, Organizations and Society 88
- Brazilian Journal of Social and Labour Economics (2)
- Cambridge Journal of Economics 45 (1)
- Challenge 63 (6)
- Forum for Social Economics 50 (1)
- International Journal of Political Economy 49 (4)
- Journal of Agrarian Change 21 (1)
- Journal of Australian Political Economy 86: Special issue on 'W(h)ither Democracy? Revisiting Neoliberalism and Democracy in Contemporary Capitalism'
- Oeconomia 10 (4)
- PSL Quarterly Review 73 (295)
- Review of Behavioral Economics 7 (4)
- Review of Keynesian Economics 9 (1)
- Review of Political Economy 33 (1)
- Science & Society 85 (1)
- Books and Book Series
- Tea War: A History of Capitalism in China and India
- American Unemployment: Past, Present, and Future
- Combatting Modern Slavery: Why Labour Governance is Failing and What We Can Do About It
- Data Feminism
- Decolonizing the University,Knowledge Systems and Disciplines in Africa
- From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century
- Making the Modern Slum: The Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay
- Mission Economy: A moonshot guide to changing capitalism
- Power and Influence of Economists: Contributions to the Social Studies of Economics
- The Emergence of Capitalism in Early America
- The Future of Social Democracy: Essays to Mark the 40th Anniversary of the Limehouse Declaration
- The Gift in the Economy and Society: Perspectives from Institutional Economics and Other Social Sciences
- The Mobilization and Demobilization of Middle-Class Revolt: Comparative Insights from Argentina
- The Truth About Modern Slavery
- Heterodox Graduate Programs, Scholarships and Grants
- Doctoral Program: The Political Economy of Inequality
- Fellowships at the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research, Austria
- New MSc programme in Political Economy and Public Policy
- For Your Information
- School of Political Economy