Blank-check companies may be little more than a quick way to de-horn unicorns
Yesterday, we asked how low SPAC-led public debuts could go, and the answer was very close to zero. Some now-public companies that rode blank-check companies to the public markets have seen 90% or more of their value deleted.
It’s difficult to overstate how far some SPAC combinations have fallen.
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The good news is that while the U.S. SPAC market went bananas last year, other countries’ public markets failed to generate as much blank-check corporate volume. Europe, for example, saw far fewer SPACs during the 2020-2021 boom than we tabulated in America. Does that mean that European startups dodged a bullet? Perhaps, but not to the degree that we may have first anticipated. Why? It comes down to company quality.