There are two kinds of useful newspaper column. There's the kind that has something new to say. Then there's the kind that has a new way to say something.
The value of the former is self-explanatory. The value of the latter is that it adds some clarity to a complexset of events, current or otherwise.
The rest is largely entertainment - whether it is designed to provoke laughter or anger or even sadness.
I'm not knocking that.
At this point, I'm not sure which way this column is headed.
One can only imagine the epic extent of market research that went on, in hushed top-secret tones, as Mark Zuckerberg plotted his grand name change.
Meta (the word) is cool. Teenagers say it. But it's also sciencey and it sounds like it might involve very smart computers.
Meta movies seem clever even though they don't quite make sense.
It's a perfect name for the kind of omnipresent self-aware tech company we all expected to be controlling our lives in the futuristic year of 2022. (Remember when the TV show Space 1999 sounded futuristic?).
In others words, it was a supremely unlikeable move.
So of course I smiled when I saw Meta take a huge stock market hit on Thursday night.
The company failed to meet targets and revealed that Facebook user numbers had - for the first time ever - fallen.
We shouldn't laugh at the misfortune of others, I thought.
But this, like a surprisingly delicious vegan ice-cream, was a guilt-free scoop of schadenfreude.
At one point shares were down 27 per cent - a vast number of billions of dollars said to be the size of the Greek economy.
Zuckerberg's fortune plunged by about NZ$40 billion in one day.
If it's all downhill from here for Meta (which it won't be) then the name change would be one the greatest acts of hubris in business history.
I'm not a shareholder, and I suppose I could feel for the ones that aren't already billionaires.
But serious tech investors will be fine.
Despite the historic crash, Meta shares really only landed back where they were at the start of the pandemic.
Which is what makes this all so interesting for all of us with investments.
Was all the growth of the past 18 months just a mirage fueled by the cheap money central banks deployed to prop things up while Covid raged?
Intuitively many of us already suspected that.
But the reality of our KiwiSaver balances or house prices crashing back to earth will still come as a shock.
There, is without a shadow of a doubt, an enormous amount of hot air to come out of the global economy - including here in New Zealand.
While consumer price inflation has hogged all the headlines lately, asset price inflation is still far more likely to be the variant that causes the serious economic sh** to hit the fan.
Tech stocks like Meta, despite all their weird amoral social influence, aren't even such terrible investments.
They might be overvalued but at least they are real businesses that provide services and earn money.
What we are seeing with cryptocurrency and the ridiculous rise of NFTs is tulip bubble stuff.
Or, at best, it's dot.com bubble stuff.
Even if you believe blockchain technology is revolutionary, with genuine value to offer the world, it isn't there yet.
It's over-valued and under-used - which puts it about where the big internet companies were in 1999.
It will crash.
The only question is whether the sums involved will be large enough, or the links into the traditional financial markets will be strong enough, to take everything else down too.
I'm ever hopeful that we'll see a series of orderly market corrections through this period of post-pandemic readjustment.
Equity markets have already hit correction territory with a 10 per cent fall this year.
But I doubt that will be enough to restore balance.
Ideally, we'll see things stabilise and then correct again then stabilise again.
As Zuckerberg now knows (and anyone who remembers 1987 already does) markets plunging more than 20 per cent in a day is no fun.
That creates panic, kills confidence and creates recessions where recessions are not necessary.
Either way, I'm braced for my KiwiSaver to keep tracking backwards for a while.
It's made big gains in the past two years without any effort on my part.
If you must track your daily balance it makes sense to mentally lop 10 or 20 per cent off when you think about how much is really there.
Will the housing market be the next bubble to pop? Photo / Fiona Goodall Photography
The same goes for the many extra thousands my house is now worth allegedly worth.
Whether I'll feel as sanguine about its value falling I don't know.
But property's massive pandemic price surge is also a side-effect of central bank medicine.
We used credit to avoid the value destruction and economic havoc that the pandemic might have caused.
I'm glad we did. It kept things working. It kept us working.
But it would be foolhardy to pretend that the pandemic didn't come at an economic cost.
It would be even sillier to believe it actually created wealth.
