Failure to deliver. This thing is ricocheting around to different brokers. They don't want to be left owing GME shares that they can't produce.
So, looking back through those OCC reports, it looks like GME first appeared on the Threshold Securities list back on January 11th. That means that there can be no more fail to delivers as of 13 business days after GME shows up on the list. 13 business days after the 11th is the 29th. Leading up to the 29th was obviously a squeeze event with the clearing houses and brokers in a panic to deliver these fail to deliver shares. I don't even think they were covering their shorts. That was around 600k shares from the last data that I saw, which was old. GME is still on the restricted list, as of yesterday.
I don't know how the regulations are working, but I think that the shorts that are left actually have less wiggle room than they did, but I'm not a securities regulator. It would seem like they can't fail to deliver as a way to keep things going. I'm not sure how settlement works on Threshold Securities, if they have to settle on the settlement day and they can't delay it. It's possible that the normal process applies to settlement of Threshold Securities, then they have either 4 or 6 trading days to deliver the shares and they can't have a failure to deliver. I think this was the main reason for the buying limitations last week. The clearing houses and brokers needed those shares to avoid not having what they needed to settle the sales.
I think there is a possibility that squeezy things will still happen this week. This theory kind of fits in with the Mega Buys of GME $800 calls that we are seeing. Someone is betting hundreds of millions of dollars on this popping off before the middle of March. The biggest buys are for this Friday.