SAN
FRANCISCO — This past week, a trading card featuring quarterback Tom Brady sold
for a record $1.3 million. The total value of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin hit $1
trillion. And Christie’s sold a digital artwork by an artist known as Beeple
for $69.3 million.
اضافة اعلان
These
seemingly singular events were all connected, part of a series of manias that
have gripped the financial world. For months, professional and everyday
investors have pushed up the prices of stocks and real estate. Now the frenzy
has spilled over into the riskiest — and in some cases, wackiest — assets,
including digital ephemera and media, cryptocurrencies, collectibles like
trading cards and even sneakers.
The surges
have been driven by a unique set of conditions. Even as millions were laid off
in the pandemic, many people’s bank accounts flourished, flush from relief
checks and government cash infusions into the economy. But while people
accumulated more money, traditional investments like stocks and bonds became
less attractive.
So many got
creative. Often, they were egged on by online communities on Reddit and
Discord, where the next big investments were debated. They also turned to tech
tools like the trading app Robinhood and the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase,
which allowed them to buy and trade different items with the click of a button.
That has now
led to minibubbles across a wide variety of esoteric categories, making
once-obscure acronyms like SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies) and
NFTs (nonfungible tokens) as ubiquitous as the S&P. It has also fed demand
for this past week’s public listings of companies like gaming site Roblox and
South Korean e-commerce company Coupang, as well as for shares of video game
retailer GameStop and other so-called “meme” stocks.
The manias,
which have erupted at a time of deep economic pain, have introduced a large
amount of risk to many investors. Some people have already racked up staggering
losses on Robinhood. Other assets, like Bitcoin, are volatile, while sneakers
and NFTs are so new that it is difficult to know what they will be worth over
time.
For now, the
bubble-upon-bubble behavior does not appear to pose a systemic risk to the
broader financial system. But some investors said they were uneasy.
“Most people
are cheering but at the same time shaking their heads and going, when is the
bust coming?” said Jane Leung, chief investment officer at SVB Private Bank.
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