In early 2021, a freewheeling, freethinking group of investors on Reddit decided to flex some collective muscle. They plowed their money into GameStop, a video game retailer that several big hedge funds had bet against. The stock price shot up, some people made millions—and, to the delight of those on Reddit, the hedge funds had some very bad days.
Hollywood turned this all into comedy with the 2023 movie Dumb Money. But researchers at RAND also saw the GameStop story as a cautionary tale. If investors on Reddit could work together to move the markets like that, what could an adversary like China do?
The researchers started looking for other emerging or understudied threats to the U.S. financial system. In a recent report, they warned that the greatest danger is not a single, sudden attack, a financial 9/11. It's the constant assault on reality—the deepfake videos and manipulated AI—that could weaken the financial system over time. It will be slow, but it will be steady and hard to stop—more like financial climate change.
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