Is Wall Street's hottest trend finally over?

The Indicator from Planet Money

NPR

Business

4.7 • 9.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 February 2024

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

WeWork, DraftKings, Lucid Motors. These are a few companies that have taken an untraditional route to go public through something called SPACs or special purpose acquisition companies. The obscure investment vehicle took off during the pandemic, but has since fallen back to earth. Today, we consider the rise and fall of SPACs and how recent rule changes will affect these deals.

Related episodes:
The SPAC is back

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Transcript

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0:00.0	NPR.
0:03.0	In the world,
0:05.0	In the world,
0:08.0	in the world of finance,
0:12.0	in the world of finance, how do you know when a bubble is about to burst? Is it when
0:17.0	Wall Street analysts start penning worried op-eds? Is it when a government agency sends
0:22.3	out a press release telling investors to beware?
0:25.0	You know I got to give a shout out to everybody in the SPAC game, help me eat good these days.
0:30.0	Or is it when a rapper writes a song all about the money he made investing in something called a spat.
0:34.8	If you win a spat game, you know what I'm talking about.
0:37.7	We sick of IPOs Day 1 locking this out.
0:40.4	I love the floor.
0:41.6	This would be the song of summer, just wait for it. But by the way this song is called
0:45.3	SPAC Dream by an Oakland rapper called cashis kouvet and in addition to professing a love of
0:51.6	Champagne he also also loves Spax.
0:54.8	Yeah, we got that.
0:55.8	I'm like a Spack, what the hell's that?
0:57.8	Get it on the ground flow.
0:59.2	It paid big, so I search and then I found more.
1:01.4	Yes, Spax, what the hell is that?
1:04.2	So Spax stands for a special purpose acquisition company,
1:08.0	and Spax have been described as a sort of backdoor way
	...

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