Signs of the forthcoming apocalypse

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

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 are good signs it must be soon. So, to keep me company while I load up the Oldsmobile 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 market cap of $800bn (the same as the total market cap of the next NINE biggest auto manufacturers)
• 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”.