521. Whoopee Time in America

                      BROWDERBOOKS

Big news!  Amazon now ranks my nonfiction title New Yorkers: A Feisty People Who Will Unsettle, Madden, Amuse and Astonish You as 

• no. 1 in Emigrants & Immigrants Biographies
• no, 7 in New York City Travel Books
• no. 74 in History of U.S. Immigration.

I am amazed, surprised, confounded, and delighted.  Anything under 100 impresses me.  These ratings can change from week to week, but anyway...  And maybe this helps explain why its sales have picked up, though my Amazon ads could well be the main reason.  (They are another story.)

New Yorkers is the third title in my #Wild New York series of nonfiction works about New York and New Yorkers.  It combines memoir, history, and travel lore, a mix that annoys some readers and delights others.  A fun book -- Basques, hustlers, Broadway, booze, the Beatles, graffiti, chorus boys -- but with serious moments: cholera, fires, dying. #historical #history #nonfiction #travel #newyorkbook

Available from Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

               Whoopee Time in America

It’s Whoopee time in America, it’s gaga, it’s carnival, it’s South Sea Bubble time, it’s tulip time, it’s the party to end all parties, and everyone is invited.  But consider this:

If your barber tells you he has invested heavily in Tesla, the maker of electrical cars, whose stock has already risen eightfold,

or Aunt Sally, who has never invested, asks you if Bitcoin would be  good investment,

or Cousin Willy boasts of making a killing in the market, but when you ask him if he put his winnings in the bank, he says no, of course not, he reinvested them in another highly speculative enterprise,

if such things happen, it is safe to assume that a lot of your fellow citizens are plunged neck-deep in a bubble, and that bubbles have a way of bursting.

I have been aware for months of the stock market flirting with its all-time highs, but only recently, thanks to an article in The New York Review of Books, did I grasp how bad it is:

• Margin debt is at an all-time high, just like in 1929, the year of the Great Crash, which means that a lot of people are buying stocks with borrowed money;
• A record amount of money has gone into initial public offerings (IPOs) — the stock of new companies untested by time;
• Special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) have proliferated and raked in billions from investors, buying unlisted companies that escape regulation, and such imaginative ventures as flying-taxi start-ups;
• The cryptocurrency Bitcoin, priced at $7,000 in January 2020, has risen above $63,000;
• Young investors calling themselves “retards,” “apes,” and “degens” are scornful of traditional investors, and embrace the rallying cry YOYO (you're only young once).

All of which recalls the collective madnesses of the past: the tulip bulb craze of 1636-1637 in Holland; the South Sea Bubble of 1720 in London; the Mississippi Scheme of 1720 in Paris; and in the US, the promotion of Western railroads (anything with “& Pacific” in the name) in the late 1860s and early 1870s, projecting railroads into a wilderness whose native peoples, antelope, and bison felt no need of a railroad.  All these bubbles burst, and thousands lost millions.  

I’m no investment adviser and have no credentials to justify my opinions.  But I’ve been in the market many years and have been through many cycles of boom and bust.  I don’t know when the bubble will burst or what will trigger it.  I’m simply of the strong personal opinion that we are in a colossal bubble, and sooner or later bubbles are sure to burst.  So I don’t urge anyone to join the party — it’s much too late for that.  Keep out, or if you have a sound long-term investment plan, just stick to it and ignore the brouhaha.  Whatever you do or don’t do, good luck!    

Source note: This post was inspired  in part by Edward Chancellor’s article “Waiting to Deflate,” in the August 19, 2021, issue of The New York Review of Books.  Many of the facts cited come from that excellent article.

©  2021 Clifford Browder

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