It feels like its part of the broader, somewhat global, rebellion against the financial economy; all the domains of finance which have become disconnected from the real markets and real economy, which more-often-than-not only exist for banks to make money off each other, and to crash both the real and financial economies when they screw up.

Arguably, it started back in 2008 with the global recession, which was, again arguably, totally the result of missteps and corruption in the financial economy. By the end of that, practically no one was held accountable for what happened. and we entered an insane decade+ long bull market inflated by our sovereigns printing money rarely to support Americans, but rather American companies and our financial markets. This bull market coincides with a massive rise in cryptocurrency, which also represents a rebellion against established financial markets and the meddling of both sovereigns and financial corporations in the financial stability of the average citizen.

Then, you reach short-interest, which historically serves some minuscule, though non-zero, amount of utility for the real economy, and has come under legitimate fire as being another tool which puts our economy at risk. I think the problem with short selling is best summed up by the end of the Big Short, as the main characters are sitting on steps of an abandoned bank, having made billions of dollars profiting off of the destruction of the American economy. The strange thing about markets, and economics in general, is that they are self-fulfilling prophesies. If enough people want a stock to drop, if they want a company to suffer by having a financial interest in it suffering; it will. This is different from simply selling a stock, which in-some-way causes the price to drop, because it changes the narrative from "I don't think it will go up" to "I think it will go down". By selling a stock, you're removing your stake; by short-selling, you're increasing your stake in a negative direction (and moreover, short interest is almost always leveraged, which compounds the problem).

In other words, I think the increasing zeitgeist surrounding the perception of our financial markets as being unable to serve the interests of the real economy, and more importantly the average American, is an unusually accurate response to a real problem, and it follows that it would become a social justice issue. The government needs to take this seriously; again, economies are self-fulfilling prophesies. Crisis often start not because there is a crisis, but because people believe there's a crisis.