It's 03:30 ET on Thursday January 28 2021. You're a treasury engineer on the Robinhood Clearing risk desk. GME has rallied from $20 to $480 in eight trading days, driven by retail. Overnight, the NSCC (National Securities Clearing Corporation, the central counterparty that nets and guarantees every US equity trade through T+2 settlement) has run its end-of-day risk calculation and pushed Robinhood a margin call of about $3 billion to cover unsettled positions in GME, AMC, BB, KOSS, NOK and a handful of other meme tickers. That's roughly ten times any previous deposit Robinhood has ever posted. The cash on hand is nowhere near that. Markets open at 09:30. Every decision you make in the next six hours will be on a Senate hearing transcript within a month.