It can be very hard for ordinary investors to separate fact from hype.
— U.S. Department of Labor, warning against investing in cryptocurrency in 401(k) plans

1) Greed, 2) Grift, 3) Hype, 4) Enabling Delusions,  5) Overshoot, and 6) Shattered Dreams

h/t: The Polish Rifle

Don’t think even the great, but duped Tom Brady can bring this one back.  The Fed, alone, began the extraction of over $1 trillion of liquidity from the economy over the next 18 months on Wednesday.  We suspect not crypto positive.  

Bitcoin is down 50 percent since the onslaught of the Super Bowl commercials trying to sucker in a new pool of greater fools.  One helluva store of value currency. 

The Super Bowl commercials were clearly a signal that marked the top of dot.com mania, which crashed a few months later in March.

Fast forward to the 2022 Super Bowl. – GMM,  February 12, 2022

The Crypto Craze will go down as The GOAT of delusional financial bubbles.  We are open to be proved wrong but doubt it.  

Matt Damon, where are you?   It was sad to see the super principled Steph Curry caught up hyping the sector.  Where are the Lakers going to play next year? 

One Last Thing

The creation of what was once a $3 trillion speculative asset class, created out of thin air, fueled by free money and delusuions with absolutely zero productive capacity, helped feed the inflation we now all experience.  The crypto crash does take some marginal pressure off monetary policy, however. 

The Crypto vs Dot.com Super Bowl

Originally Posted on February 12, 2022 by macromon

#CKStrong

Remember the 2000 Super Bowl at the peak of the dot.com mania, where newly minted dot.com companies spent most of their entire IPO proceeds to buy Super Bowl commercials to generate “eyeballs” to their websites to drive their stock price higher?  

Super Bowl XXXIV (played in January 2000) featured 14 advertisements from 14 different dot-com companies, each of which paid an average of $2.2 million per spot.[1][note 1] In addition, five companies that were founded before the dot-com bubble also ran tech-related ads, and 2 before game ads, for a total of 21 different dot-com ads. These ads amounted to nearly 20 percent of the 61 spots available,[1] and $44 million in advertising. In addition to ads which ran during the game, several companies also purchased pre-game ads, most of which are lesser known. All of the publicly held companies which advertised saw their stocks slump after the game as the dot-com bubble began to rapidly deflate.  

The sheer amount of dot-com-related ads was so unusual that Super Bowl XXXIV has been widely been referred to as the “Dot-Com Super Bowl”, and it is often used as a high-water mark for the dot-com bubble. Of these companies, 4 are still active, 5 were bought by other companies, and the remaining 5 are defunct or of unknown status.[when?] – Wikipedia

The Super Bowl commercials were clearly a signal that marked the top of dot.com mania, which crashed a few months later in March.  

Fast forward to the 2022 Super Bowl. 

Cryptocurrency’s biggest boosters would do well to remember tech’s most infamous sock puppet. The year was 2000; it was what would later be known as the “Dot-Com Super Bowl,” an NFL face-off during which tech companies bought up some 20 percent of the advertising real estate during the Big Game. A few years later, many of the companies that bought those ads were defunct or swallowed up by other firms—including Pets.com, which had run a commercial featuring a singing puppet made from a sock.

This warning comes not because crypto companies are looking to turn stockings into mascots (at least, not that we know of), but because they are currently pumping millions of dollars into buying up ad space during Super Bowl LVI. Crypto.com, which has been flooding the market with its Matt Damon-starring commercials lately, has a big spot running; cryptocurrency exchange FTX plans to give away bitcoin during its Super Bowl spot. Coinbase is also reportedly running an ad. The companies are playing coy about who will appear in them. Regardless, the message seems to be that crypto is hot and everyone should get on board. But as multiplearticleshave pointed out in the past week, the Crypto Bowl has echoes of those ill-fated tech-company ads of the past. – Wired

The dot.coms needed more eyeballs and the ads were generated to lure in more  “greater fools” to keep buying their worthless stocks to remain viable.  Ditto for crypto. 

We don’t know how this all ends but know thy history, folks.   Just sayin’.

The winner of the 2000 Super Bowl?  The Rams, gulp!