mania

Comedian Robin Williams once called cocaine “God’s way of telling you you are making too much money”. This role may now have been overtaken by non-fungible tokens, the blockchain-based means to claim unique ownership of easily copied digital assets. The latest NFT mania involves fantastic amounts of money being paid for “Bored Apes”, 10,000 avatars featuring variants of a bored-looking cartoon ape. Last month rapper Eminem (real name Marshall Mathers) paid about US$450,000 in Ethereum cryptocurrency to acquire Bored Ape No. 9055 – nicknamed EminApe, because its khaki and gold chain resembles what Eminem wears. It purportedly joins more than 160 other NFTs in the rapper’s collection. The Bored Ape character seems derivative of the drawings of Jamie Hewlett, the artist who drew Tank Girl a...

In the late 1990s, America experienced a dot-com mania. In the 2000s, the housing market went wild. Today, there are manias in everything from bitcoin and nonfungible tokens to SPACs and meme stocks – obscure corners of the market that are getting increased attention. Whether these are the next bubbles to burst remains to be seen. The sudden rise of all these relatively new asset classes – or the astronomical heights they’ve reached – may seem irrational or even enchanted. Describing them as speculative manias implies that individuals are lost in forces beyond their control and needn’t take responsibility for the actions of the crowd. But, as I learned while researching my book “Speculation: A Cultural History from Aristotle to AI,” which will be published in June 2021, financial specul...

Tag: mania

Inflated By Pop Culture And Crypto Mania – NFTs, An Overblown Speculative Bubble

How The Act Of Speculating Became A Financial Mania – From Tulips And Scrips To Bitcoin And Meme Stocks