[oh_sigh]

Since you're nice and explaining things...what happens if a naked short gets called in but literally no one will sell any stock for any amount of money, so the shorter can't fulfill their obligation?

Obviously not going to happen with GME or anywhere realistically, but I'm just curious how that would be handled.

[krok]

Something called a Failure To Deliver. Basically you have to pay extra to keep the stock one more day or whatever, and you have to deliver it the next day, or next settlement period.

The fee could be quite punitive, or fairly trivial depending on the market. In some markets failure to deliver would be a very big deal and multiple could lead to some sort of disciplinary action. In other markets they might be commonplace for whatever technical reason, and everyone expects that they will happen, just tries to avoid them because of the fee.

There are various theories that in certain markets everyone fails to deliver all the time and it means that there isn't enough of whatever to meet all the obligations. I can't really comment on how much they make sense.