By Esther Carenza ( October 15, 2021, 2:59 PM EDT) -- Although present for decades, special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) initial public offerings (IPO) have seen an unprecedented surge on Wall Street. They’ve picked up in Europe and began spreading into emerging markets just before and in the first quarter of 2021 in the U.S., raising $82.8 billion in the latter due to the extreme market volatility of the global pandemic. A SPAC is a popular instrument with 79 per cent of them in the U.S., two per cent in Canada, three per cent in China, three per cent in Israel, four per cent in the U.K. and nine per cent in other countries....