The Hawk Tuah Mob
The name Hailey Welch may not be a household name to average people, but she achieved meteoric notoriety in the past year over a simple unrehearsed response to a question posed of her in a street interview; likely when she was over-refreshed. From that response that went viral, Hailey became known as the ‘Hawk Tuah Girl’. As an example of Andy Warhol’s dictum that everyone has their 15 minutes of fame, Hailey became ubiquitous as she was interviewed by everyone who had a podcast. She threw out baseballs at games, had to hire a manager, created a merchandise line and acquired millions of on-line followers.
What else was there to do? Well, in following the most recent tide of cultural fashion, she created a digital currency…of course! On a platform called Solana, the Hawk Tuah memecoin was launched. As befitting the hysteria which is the digital currency space, the valuation instantly rose to a valuation of $500 million dollars! But wait! The Cinderella story quickly became a pumpkin when within 20 minutes of launch, the valuation had crashed to only $60 million.
Naturally a wave of outrage erupted as people who had bought into the meme token, then lost a pile of money, were indignant that this could happen. It seemed outrageous that you could actually lose money on buying nothing! Hailey went from being a heroine to a scoundrel overnight.
Those of us who’ve been around long enough to have lived through numerous market cycles are frankly amused at the outrage surrounding this fiasco. As is standard for human nature throughout time, blame is always directed everywhere except where it rightfully belongs….with oneself.
The modern crop of internet speculators are such ripe victims for naïve market activity. They don’t know a treasury bond from a James Bond, yet they are lured with visions of instant wealth by others who have purportedly done the same thing successfully. There is a distinct difference between price and value. As reference for those who don’t know the difference, price is the level at which parties agree upon when they have different perceptions of value. Somebody thinks something is cheap, while the other party thinks it’s expensive.
In fact the ‘Hawk Tua’ memecoin is an excellent example of any free market, including stocks, real estate, jewelry, baseball cards and especially art. There is in fact no absolute inviolable value of anything, only the price at which an item can fetch from another buyer. The only reason that anything has any value at all is because someone else thinks there is a benefit to owning it.
Despite this basic truth, there are entire industries and countless people employed with the premise of advising people what to buy and to assess valuations of all manner of assets. The fundamental reality of all free markets is that a price exists for an item only at that point in time and is entirely dependent on the confidence of the market players.
History is rife with examples of crazes and fads that have existed throughout time and through many different cultures. A classic work which documents some of the more famous ones is “Extraordinary Popular Delusions And The Madness Of Crowds” compiled by Charles Mackay. He documents the environment that gave rise the infamous “South Sea Bubble” and “Tulip-mania”. With humor and hindsight, he documents some of the greatest human foibles and neuroses throughout history.
Suffice to say, it must be in the human condition to be swept up by a frenzy of the mob and that once ensnared, the mob will have a life of its own, overwhelming individual’s ability to act intelligently. So for those who got swept up in the Hawk Tuah frenzy, or Bitcoin fever, or real estate panic, or collector watches; congratulations, you are the mob.