It’s not yet two months old, but 2021 already looks poised to outdo 2020 in one area: SPACs, or special purpose acquisition companies, raised around $26 billion in January this year in the United States, nearly a third of the record $83 billion collected by 248 SPACs over the whole of 2020.  These so-called “blank check” shell companies have no operations or business plan other than to acquire a private company using the money raised through an IPO, thereby enabling the latter to go public quickly.