‘Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga’ assessment: Netflix presents the David-vs.-Goliath battle that roiled Wall Street

USA Prime Time
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The greatest a part of “Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga” is that it manages to inform a sophisticated monetary story with a good quantity of humor and context, in a approach that doesn’t demonize the varied events, which doesn’t spare them from varied ranges of mockery. The result’s a Netflix docuseries that, regardless of a number of excesses, exposes the extra ridiculous facets of inventory buying and selling and the place all that paper can come to resemble a home of playing cards.

The attraction of the GameStop story resided within the David-vs.-Goliath framework of on-line merchants primarily banding collectively to buck typical knowledge by investing in a perceived dinosaur inventory, within the course of threatening the comfortable velvet-rope existence of big hedge funds, whose conceitedness relating to the preliminary encroachment started to resemblance hubris because it got here crashing down on them.

Produced together with the Wall Street Journal, the docuseries (actually only a function documentary, diced into three 40-minute components) largely resists the temptation to take sides, though a number of of these featured or interviewed can’t assist however seem a bit foolish, amongst them CNBC’s bombastic Jim Cramer.

The identical goes for the eccentric forged of characters that occupied the David function, though to be honest, the mission would have been higher had it curbed indulging its extra outlandish impulses, like permitting one in every of them to rap badly.

The basic query on the coronary heart of all of it is who wound up manipulating whom, as teams utilizing Reddit (by way of its WallStreetBets neighborhood) and TikTok saved bidding up GameStop’s inventory worth at a second when hedge funds had been shorting it.

Director Theo Love represents all sides of that equation, with narrator Guy Raz and his USA Prime Time-honed supply bringing simply the correct quantity of caprice to the proceedings, whereas underscoring the intense disruptive potential of an entity like Robinhood’s pledge to democratize buying and selling.

As the title suggests, the documentary additionally faucets into simmering resentment towards the monetary business amongst folks who see the system as being rigged towards them, which provoked delight watching an enterprise just like the hedge fund Melvin Capital hemorrhage cash as quick sellers misplaced billions.

Perhaps essentially the most salient impression watching “Eat the Rich,” although, is recalling simply how large the story was – and the way rapidly media and markets transfer on, with out addressing the vulnerabilities that allowed the GameStop saga to unfold.

That may make for an entertaining David-vs.-Goliath story in Netflix phrases, however it doesn’t resolve the truth that when you’ve got investments within the inventory market, it’s hardly reassuring to know that even the so-called good cash – the parents who play Monopoly, because the saying goes, with actual buildings – can wind up getting whacked proper between the eyes.

“Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga” premieres September 28 on Netflix.