The anger toward brokerages like Robinhood, WeBull, Interactive Brokers, TD Ameritrade, and others for restricting buy orders of GameStop (GME) last week hasn’t died down.

As the stock surged, politicians on both sides of the aisle, pundits, and Elon Musk all joined in to condemn the system.

Across social media, some have pushed conspiracy theories that Robinhood and others acted in conjunction with hedge funds short the stock to prevent people from buying. Others have suggested the SEC told the brokers to stop the buys, ostensibly at the behest of the “hedge funds,” despite hedge funds also being winners in the rally, as well as the losers.

What needs to happen now, said Chester Spatt, former SEC chief economist and professor at the Tepper School of Business at Carnegie Mellon University, is a measure of order as we ask questions and figure out what happened.

“First, we have to let the SEC staff do an autopsy, and only later should lawmakers be debating possible changes in the regulatory framework,” Spatt told Yahoo Finance. “First, let’s see what the regulatory framework did. Why did it do that? And to what extent are the actions of the participants appropriate?”

The questions we need to be asking

In another interview Friday, Spatt said most people don’t realize the complexity of the plumbing behind what happens when someone makes a trade. Though perhaps a stock should be as simple as buying something on Amazon, it’s still more like buying a house: There’s an agreement when you click “buy,” but then there’s a period before settlement, the moment where transfer of ownership and funds occur. It’s not as long as a real estate transaction, but since 2017, that period has been two days.

In the interval between a buy order is made and settlement, a lot could conceivably happen. In an extreme scenario, the buyer might not come through with funds or the seller with the shares, which is why there are rules and regulations to assure this does not happen.

Some of these regulations deal with brokerages maintaining margin and deposit requirements with clearinghouses. And if a brokerage doesn’t have enough money to essentially back up its customers’ transactions, it can’t use investor money.(This is the case for market orders, not just orders with “margin” despite the word margin in both.)

This is what the CEOs of WeBull and Robinhood said happened. As trading surged in a handful of popular stocks last week, like GameStop and AMC, dramatic swings in the value of those shares spurred the clearinghouse that processes and settles the trades to ask Robinhood for more cash to cover potential losses on the transactions. Robinhood secured $1 billion the following day.