Robin Hood The Rebellion
On Friday, Robinhood reported revenues from equities trading plummeted 73 per cent over the March 2022 quarter versus the prior year period fuelled by a 20-fold rise in GameStop shares and collective delusion that making money in the sharemarket is easy.
Robin Hood The Rebellion
As a theoretical example, a market maker might match 10 offers to sell 10 Robinhood shares for $US100 with corresponding orders to buy 10 Robinhood shares for $US99.95, with the US5 spread being its profit. About US2 of that is passed back to Robinhood as payment for the order flow.
Best execution has already proved more damaging to Robinhood. In 2020, the SEC fined it $US65 million for operational failures that robbed its retail traders of $US34.1 million via inferior trade price execution, even after accounting for savings from free brokerage.
How can a desire for rebellion drive institutional agency, and how is such desire produced? In this paper, we develop a theory of minor rebellion as a form of institutional agency. Drawing from the work of Deleuze and Guattari as well as from notions of social inquiry and the sociology of punk, we qualify and illustrate minor rebellion as a lived-in field of desire and engagement that involves deterritorializing of practice in the institutional field. Three sets of processes are involved: (i) minor world-making, through establishing the aesthetics and relations of an outsider social network within a major field, including the enactment of cultural frames of revolt and radicalism; (ii) minor creating, through constructing and experimenting with terms, concepts, and technology that somehow challenge hegemony from within; and (iii) minor inquiring, through problematizing social purposes and the related experiential surfacing of the desirable new. Minor rebellion suggests a new solution to the paradox of embedded agency by describing institutional agency as shuttling between political contest and open-ended social inquiry, involving anti-sentiments, but also being for something. The paper also contributes to recasting institutional agency as a process resulting from emergent collective action rather than preceding it. To illustrate our theorizing, we describe the emergence of Robin Hood Asset Management, a Finnish activist hedge fund. At the end of the paper we discuss how minor rebellion raises new questions about the multiplicities and eventness of desiring in institutional agency.
There wasn't a hint of socio-economic deprivation to their rebellion. Their adventurism and treachery was entirely a function of ideological perversion, just as it is with those People's War Group cadres who planted the deadly claymore mines on the road to Tirupati. It comes as no real surprise that initial investigations point to the role of some middle class, human rights activists. It is also entirely predictable that the PWG leaders who have proudly owned up to the attempted assassination aren't unlettered adivasis groaning under the weight of feudal oppression, but hardened Marxist apparatchiks.
The idea that civil war has to be feasible to occur, and that feasibility is largely a function of the availability of lootable income has gained wide acceptance in the specialized literature on civil war. A parallel debate exists on whether or not liberal, capitalist economies produce a lower risk of domestic conflict. A micro logic for why capitalist economies are less likely to break down in armed conflict is offered to bridge these two literatures. It argues that autarchic economic policies often associated with predatory states drive investment in the shadows for capturing rents from market-constraining policies. The survivability of groups is based on infrastructures of violence and escape rather than simply the availability of lootable income. Free-market economies are far less likely to generate investment in this form of rebellion-specific capital that ultimately facilitates an open challenge of predatory states. Such a view of conflict is able to reconcile why internal conflicts last long, how narratives of greed and grievance coexist in conflict zones, why dominant state forces fail to stamp out insurgency, and why autarchic states are highly militarized. Any theory focused on grabbing to explain the onset of conflict should endogenize the causes of survivability, which ultimately determines how many battle deaths get generated to meet the threshold for becoming a civil war.
Gerald Schneider (2014) provides a thorough review of the theoretical and empirical literature on the capitalist peace and concludes that we need to move beyond the macro-level arguments, clearly identifying the societal actors and a micro logic for why peace obtains under capitalistic conditions. According to him, a political economy logic allows the identification of winners and losers from economic openness. In poor countries, where most civil wars are located, greater openness may lead to the displacement of state-sector workers, for example, which may lead to grievance-based rebellion.8 However, liberalization could very well have many offsetting effects, such as less inflation and greater access to goods, including higher returns for farming. Indeed, a simple Hecksher-Olin, Ricardo-Samuelson-Viner type model of trade will predict that poor countries gain from trade because labor is the abundant factor. Why the losers, which in the poor-country situation would be capital, would organize costly conflict is a mystery. Property owners with capital would surely have very high opportunity costs for organizing armed violence.
10. Far from providing a public good, often revolutions occur because of well-placed individuals pursuing private aims, which may explain why successful rebellions break down (Kurrild-Klitgaard, 2004; Tullock, 1971).
13. Collier and Hoeffler (2004) use primary commodity exports and a composite measure capturing the opportunity costs of rebellion as their main measure. These measures have been criticized for being quite ambiguous and having little predictive power (Fearon, 2005; Vahabi, 2016; Ward et al., 2010).
"A compelling reboot of the Robin Hood myth." --Rick Riordan, bestselling author of Percy Jackson & the OlympiansWhen twelve-year-old Robyn Loxley set out to save her parents, she never could've predicted that she would become Robyn Hoodlum, leader of the rebellion against the harsh government led by Ignomus Crown. But Robyn's attempt to free her parents has failed, and on top of that, her friends have been captured. And now Crown has given her 72 hours to turn herself in--or else. Now Robyn must decide between sacrificing herself, saving her parents and friends, or advancing the rebellion. With the stakes higher than ever, will Robyn be able to succeed? Read all the books in the Robyn Hoodlum series:Shadows of SherwoodRebellion of ThievesReign of Outlaws 041b061a72