What Are We Going to Do with All These Unicorns?

April 27, 2023

by Wolf Richter Wolf Street

Another Easy-Money hangover.

During the 14-year reign of Easy Money, which started in 2008 and ended in 2022, everything became possible, and there were no limits to asset prices and valuations because when money is free, price doesn’t matter.

So the number of US-based unicorns that were created in the venture capital world each year soared from 9 in 2012 to 344 – or about 1.3 per business day – in 2021. November 2021 was the moment of peak Consensual Hallucination, as I call it. Since then, the Nasdaq has dropped 27%.