The crypto collapse and the end of the magical thinking that infected capitalism

At a guest lecture at a military academy when

the price of a

single

Bitcoin neared US$60,000

, I was asked, as finance professors often are, what I thought about cryptocurrencies. Rather than respond with my usual scepticism, I polled the students. Over half of them had traded cryptocurrencies, often financed by loans.

I was stunned. How could these young people come to spend time and energy in this way? And they were hardly alone. The appetite for crypto has been most pronounced among Generation Z and millennials. Those groups became investors in the past 15 years at previously unseen rates and with exceedingly optimistic expectations.