Sony Pictures For a brief period at the beginning of 2021, Nigel Farage and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez were in agreement: the people had been cheated. Thousands of small “retail” investors had staged an unprecedented assault on Wall Street by buying shares in GameStop, an ailing chain of video-game shops. This created a huge spike in GameStop’s stock price and exposed a group of predatory hedge funds – which had “shorted”, or bet against, the stock – to billions of dollars in losses. But trading was suddenly paused, the movement sputtered, and the populists wanted answers. The Robespierre of this revolution was...