The Jolly Contrarian

Signs of the forthcoming apocalypse

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.

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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”.
  • GameStop.
  • The return from the dead of MoviePass.
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