February 10, 2022 - 10:31am
Amid every financial craze throughout history, from the South Sea Bubble to the 1840s Railway Mania to the more recent Dotcom Boom, there are always pointers that exhibit the utter craziness of that period. Today, in what is undoubtedly the frothiest market bubble for some time, we’ve been graced with an abundance of bizarre products that have offered us similar signals. And perhaps the strangest product of them all is the oversized iPad attached to an exercise bike (and other pieces of gym equipment) made by Peloton.
The U.S.-based manufacturer of “unique” gym equipment offers consumers a chance to experience luxury gym sessions at home. But it comes at a hefty price: its bike, for example, starts at $1,495, reaching up to $3,035 for its Bike+ model, and for full access to “classes, live streams, leaderboards, and metrics,” you must shell out an extra $39 per month. Plus, with its competitors offering virtually the same product at a cheaper price, the only reason to pay more is for the “Peloton experience”. Whatever that means.
But with the pandemic waning and consumers vowing to return to “normal,” ditching Covid-centric activities is becoming more commonplace. In turn, Peloton’s sales have hit the brakes. The company, even during its peak, failed to turn a profit. Consequently, its stock has plunged from its December high of $151.72 to just around $38 per share, forcing the company to lay off over 3,000 of its 12,000 employees and replace its CEO this week. Now, in a classic “sources familiar with the matter” scenario, rumours of retail behemoths Amazon and Nike acquiring the struggling exercise equipment-maker have saved its stock price for now.
Peloton’s plunging share price is part of a bigger selloff of “risky assets and ventures”, a cushy idiom for overpriced junk that always attracts speculative buyers. The crypto market has lost a trillion dollars in market capitalisation; SPACs (special purpose acquisition companies), which allow companies to go public without receiving almost any scrutiny, have been dumped; and company shares within the dubious ARK “Innovation ETF” have been pummelled, with most stocks down over 50% since the height of the euphoria in October last year.
Why did it end around then? Probably because many U.S economic indicators had peaked and begun to slow. Small business sentiment started to fall, while the ISM Manufacturing and Services Indices began to slow. American consumer sentiment, then already at a low, has continued its decline.
Meanwhile, in the face of rising inflation, Federal Reserve officials are signalling their willingness to up-the-ante on interest rates, tightening monetary conditions, in order to try and prevent rising consumer prices.
Slowing growth, rising interest rates, and a Federal Reserve ending its latest bout of monetary easing. What could be worse for low-quality stocks like Peloton that have been surfing the wave of speculative hype since their very inception? Since the global financial system is now more leveraged than ever, the next financial meltdown won’t end well for the broader market, let alone stocks behind companies built on outlandish products and a slick narrative. Peloton is just the beginning.
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SubscribeIf I understand correctly, this is what they are paying for now.
I imagine feminists of an older generation (X to Boomer) are enemies of Ms Rooney who is as surely as fond of trans rights as she is of Palestinian liberation.
yes, it’s popular chick-lit
(with some pretentious bits chucked in to flatter it’s female readers that they are doing something ‘literary’ )
Does anyone think straight men have these concerns?
I think so, yes, when it comes to novels by Hunter S. Thompson and David Foster Wallace (grandparented by Hemingway). Men, especially young ones in their 20s, go through the same tortured self-examination when reading those authors or watching a movie like Fight Club.
It seems we have too many female Eng Lit graduates, prone to spouting femi-drivel such as a “fight to the death over what it means to be a woman writer, a woman reader…the schizophrenic experience of being a young woman reading Sally Rooney.” Eh? It’s just a novel – not an opportunity to self-dramatise pretentiously.
is this a resp0nse type article woud be good to mention straight off
Worth reading the article just for this.
Thank god I lived in an age where reading was pure pleasure and my brain did not feel obliged to tie itself into knots, thus raising my blood pressure. I covered a myriad of subjects and no ism or ology disturbed me. I could tell within a couple of sentences whether it was well or badly written, my only criteria.
Is it literary criticism, or a mini guide on how to read oneself into a work of fiction? Are they both the same?
99.99% of modern women fiction writers are excruciatingly bad. Hasn’t been a good one since Patricia Highsmith and there’s only the great Agatha before her. These are facts.
Sowerby is very good indeed.
“…and more than anything, try to get over yourself. I’m working on that.”
Er, work harder, perhaps by asking yourself what George Eliot or Simone de Beauvoir would make of this article and its preoccupations.
Lie (naked or not, up to you), chin in hand, with thinking cap on (for five marks, does this technically count as clothing?), and read the Leonard Cohen poem apparently meant just for you:
A person who eats meat
wants to get his teeth into something
A person who does not eat meat
wants to get his teeth into something else
If these thoughts interest you for even a moment
you are lost.
Nothing in this has made me change my mind about reading only White male authors, although I have been planning to make an exception for Edith Wharton, having thoroughly enjoyed The Age of Innocence a few years ago.
And yes I have read and esteem all of Austen and Eliot, and some of Woolf.
I know where you are coming from. But it took me a while to realise most writers were left wing too.
Susanna clarke is good
If you want to read a great woman author, read Marguerite Yourcenar, the author of “The Memoirs of Hadrian” and “The Abyss” two of my favourite books of all time. Being a serious classical scholar, Yourcenar, the first woman to be voted a member of the French Royal Academy, didn’t need to splash her erudition around, she entirely concentrated on the human and moral dilemmas. She would have had no time for Rooney.
“Lying naked with her chin in her hand, reading poetry.”
I’ve been engaging with poetry alot more over the last 2 years (my new year’s resolution for 2023 and 2024 was to learn one poem a month by heart) and never once did it occur to me to pull this move.
Poetry reading was something I did when I was between tasks at my desk (or trying to put off said tasks at said desk). It also fit quite nicely into the time I was waiting for pasta to cook or the washing machine to finish.
But maybe I’m missing something. Maybe it is time to throw one’s inhibitions (and knickers) to the wind and roll around on my bed in my birthday suit reciting Maya Angelou or Christina Rossetti. I think the other half would be on board with the idea.
Now I’m going to have to look up Maya Angelou and Christina Rossetti!
I thought that their work would lend itself to naked poetry sessions more than, say, Rudyard Kipling’s “If”. That would just be odd.
If only he’d written “When”, not “If”.
Indeed. Just want to check if they’d interest the Mrs.
One step at a time.
Don’t bother with Angelou. Definitely bother with Rossetti. Esp Goblin Market.
You’re funny!
Please keep us posted on how this goes, Katharine!
I don’t know Rossetti, but Angelou is drivel.
Still I Rise might be more appropriate for an elderly male poetry neophyte.
I enjoy Poppy Sowerby’s writing. It’s clever, self aware and an insight into a generation that increasingly seems like an alien species to a boomer like me.
This one seems to hit on something I’ve noticed in various interactions with younger women. The extent to which feminist ideology, and the actual experience of being a woman, are in conflict and the strange mental gymnastics that leads to.
Glad I read this article so I won’t waste time reading the narcissistic books.
You can put Colleen Hoover in that category too. Over-hyped, excruciating trash.
There’s a reason I have only one book by a woman in my personal library. Sowerby explains it perfectly, and if she writes a book, that might make two.
This is really good. It’s very smart and funny in capturing – substantively and performatively – the issues of readerly self-awareness that gather around certain artists in the social media age, and really seem to gather around Sally Rooney.
That’s a helpful comment. I enjoyed this article and you’ve summarized its strong points better than I could.
Am I the biggest misogynist I know?
Oh, go on, do it – women have been doing it for years.
I read one of her novels, Normal People, I think. It was readable, the style was engaging but that was about it. I thought it should be re-marketed as Young Adult fiction – 15 to mid twenties. It was very self-conscious; acutely concerned of how she, as an author, comes across. When she announced her anti-Israeli stunt, mentioned in the article, that confirmed my impressions. She clearly has talent but I’m not rushing to buy the book reviewed here. Maybe in ten years time, she might turn her gaze away from her navel, and write something of interest – the talent is there.