Signs of the forthcoming apocalypse

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I am no financial wizard, readers, but I’m getting the sense the market just feels a bit toppy. This a detect not by reference to an unusual contango in the front-month Brent Crude contract — any experts reading will know at once I am not even sure what that is — nor because of non-farm payroll data, nor mean-reversion in the residential real estate market (ditto, ditto), but because sensible investors are doing plainly bonkers things.

In March 2021 it seemed as good a time as any to start compiling signs of the forthcoming apocalypse. Now as we all know, apocalypses can stay irrational a lot longer than I can stay sober, so I can’t make any definitive call as to when we are going into the abyss, but, as sure as death, taxes and rice-pudding we are, and there signs it might be soon. So, to keep me company while I load up the van with shotgun cartridges and tins of spam, and with feeling, but in no particular order:

  • Bitcoin (1) existing; (2) having a value greater than nil; (3) staying in existence for even after one obviously speculative bubble in 2018 (4) continuing to stay in existence for three years; and (5) having another blatantly obvious speculative bubble, three times bigger than the first one; (6) TESLA blowing a billion and a half on bitcoin at the top of the speculative bubble.
  • Tesla having a bigger market cap of $800bn than the next NINE biggest auto manufacturers put together
  • Special purpose acquisition companies.
  • Talk of “liberalising” London’s listing rules to allow for SPACs
  • Non-fungible tokens are selling. Even ones of an artwork actually called “Morons.