Signs of the forthcoming apocalypse

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary
The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™

Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary

Tell me more Sign up for our newsletter — or just get in touch: for ½ a weekly 🍺 you get to consult JC. Ask about it here.

I am no financial wizard, readers, but I’m getting the sense the market just feels a bit toppy. This I 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 suspicious softness non-farm payroll data, nor mean-reversion in the residential real estate default rates (ditto, ditto), but because folks just seem to be doing plainly bonkers things.

There is no time like the present, and here, in early March 2021 I thought I would 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. Just generally.
Talk of “liberalising” London’s listing rules to allow for SPACs
Non-fungible tokens are selling. Even ones of an artwork actually called “Morons”.