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Welcome to the views room. I'm Rob Cox, the editor of Breaking Views, coming to you from

Zurich, Switzerland. This week's episode is dedicated to the

SPAC craze, which has kept Wall Street busy over the past couple of years. Some 400 so-called

special purpose acquisition vehicles have raised hundreds of billions of dollars from investors on the

promise that they will find and buy promising companies around the world.

We at Breaking Views have been writing about SPACs for some time and decided to pull together

some of our coverage into a new book that Laura Loflin, our M&A editor in New York, compiled,

called The Art of the SPAC.

The book makes for a fun and informative read on this bonanza, which up to now has made

quite a few bold-faced names on Wall Street

even richer, brought some fascinating if early-stage companies into the public markets and

generally not created too many disasters in its wake. But as Lauren and Richard discuss,

it's still early earnings for this speculative fervor in the market, and regulators are keenly

examining whether it poses a risk to investors

...