So CEO of webull basically lays it all out.
Cliff notes:
There wasn't enough market liquidity (as in the entire stock exchange) to cover all the GME trades.
When a stock is sold, the value of the stock must be placed into escrow with the clearinghouse for a couple days until the trades clear the system.
Since the hedge funds couldn't cover the cost of the trades to exit their shorts it would have fallen upon the clearinghouse.
That clearinghouse is the DTCC.
The DTCC is the depository trust and clearing corporation.
The DTCC is a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal reserve.
The address of the DTCC is 55 Water St, New York, NY 10041, United States
Watch the water.
Since the DTCC typically only requires 1-2% of the value of the share to be placed into escrow, they normally have enough market liquidity to keep things moving.
DTCC was demanding 100% on GME, AMC, etc because of the volatility. This ensures that the people that bought at a price would get all of their money.
Except the DTCC didn't have enough money to cover all of the GME stocks at 100%, so they had to halt trading, or DTCC would have run out of money, and it would have fallen upon the underwriter of the clearinghouse, the fed, to pony up.
This is why sales of GME and others were blocked.
The stupid fucking hedgefunds almost broke the fed, because the only way for the fed to dump more liquidity into the market would have been to buy more bonds from uncle sam to create more money.
That requires authorization from congress.
Further compounding this issue is that the only way to sell bonds is to take a cash payment from someone that wants to buy them.
Since the GME stock would have eaten up 100% of liquidity, nobody would have had any cash to pay for more bonds to make more money.
Boooommmm…..