2018 looks to be a jolly year; it has the potential for no less than four kinds of financial disaster: a major “fringe market” crash in crypto-currencies with credit implications, a stock market crash of the old-fashioned kind, a massive bond market crash as yields return to reality and a recession, which Trump-haters no doubt hope will be deep and long. Yet history shows that the four types of disaster need not be connected, and not all need occur simultaneously. For us as investors and participants in the economy, that should be a huge relief.

The crypto-currency bust is the likeliest to occur in 2018. I have written in the past that this event is unlikely before the total value of all crypto-currencies exceeds $1 trillion. Well, that total value is already above $750 billion and climbing very rapidly indeed. Furthermore, the reduction in Bitcoin dominance that I had forecast is also occurring; Bitcoin’s share of the total crypto-currency pool is down to 33% from the 62% at which it stood when Bitcoin briefly topped $20,000. I regard this a healthy sign of the market’s maturing. Bitcoin, while the “first mover” is by the standards of the best crypto-currencies very clunky in its blockchain and nowhere near anonymous enough.

One of crypto-currencies’ numerous enthusiasts, apart from predicting a Bitcoin price of $1 million (which would imply a crypto-currency market capitalization of around $30 trillion, eight times U.S. M1 money supply) also explained to his readers how the sophisticated money coming into the market, the stage we are at now, will be exceeded by a mass entry from John Q Public, at which time the bubble will peak.

I think this is precisely the reverse of the crypto-reality. John Q Public has been in the market all along; crypto-currencies have been invented and promoted by nerds in basements, not by Wall Street. Now big money and Wall Street is getting into the market, long after many retail investors have made fabulous percentage gains. There is no huge further group of retail investors who will follow Wall Street into the market and bail them out. Wall Street has been very late to this game, has sneered at it continually, and is only now piling in when the market, speaking logarithmically at least, must be far closer to the top than the bottom. There are no more 2000% gains to be had here; instead, there is a crisis of illiquidity coming, doubtless accompanied by discoveries of excess leverage, in which the usual dozy and dishonest Wall Street titans will participate fully. This time Wall Street, not the general public, will turn out to be the suckers who discovered the market late.