How Spacs went splat

Jesse Livermore was a legendary trader who made and lost several fortunes in the early 20th century, most famously by shorting the Wall Street crash of 1929. His early life was immortalised in the roman à clef Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre, and his trading in ...  Show more

When the South Sea Bubble burst in 1720, it wiped out fortunes and plunged Britain into its first great stock market crisis. The collapse of the South Sea Company, a government-backed scheme that promised to turn national debt into riches, left the country's finances in disarray ...  Show more

SPACs have been around a long time. The basic premise is that a group of people raise a bunch of money from public market investors, with the premise of then going out to buy a specific, individual company. They're seen as an alternative to IPOs. While historically they've had a ...  Show more

In this week's episode, we unpack the following four stories in the world of corporate finance.

How a SPAC operates 

We all lived through the SPAC boom of 2021 – when the blank check mergers accounted for 61% of all U.S. public listings that year… and the subsequent bust, with at least a dozen going bankrupt since then and more than a hundred now running low on cash. But even though many sto ...