Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

Welcome back, everyone, to my final podcast of 2021, where we'll look back at the big financial

events of the year and the lessons that we learned. After 2020 was mostly lost to the COVID pandemic, we started 2021 with quite a bit of optimism.

Vaccines were about to be rolled out, economies were expected to recover, and a new president

was about to be sworn into the White House.

Despite all of the optimism, many of us found

ourselves slowly learning the Greek alphabet as new COVID variants emerged.

2021 was not an uneventful year. We had meme stocks, spacks, hedge fund blowups and the mainstreaming

of crypto. The stock market went from strength to strength this year.

As global economies bounced back, supply chains buckled because of shortages either of goods

or of people to deliver them. The squeeze on the labour market pushed up wages and the press

was filled with tales of the Great Resignation.

We saw soaring oil and commodities prices and the collapse of Chinese property giant Evergrand.

But none of this could derail investor exuberance. Stock markets and house prices took off in 2021.

In the world of geopolitics, the first big story of the year was Brexit, Britain's withdrawal

from the EU.

On top of this, the tensions between the United States and China was a big theme and may remain

so in 2022.

As the year comes to an end, Russia's intentions towards Ukraine are

raising concerns worldwide.

2021 was a big year for IPOs. A thousand and fifty-eight companies went public over the course

of the year. As crypto went mainstream, we saw every social media influencer launched their own coin or

...