When money dries up, the vision needs to be crystal clear, memes can melt - in the excellent paper Manias and Mimesis by Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart, they outlined how the meme (here a startup, but it applies broadly) dies: The cycle of a startup might look like this: - Someone has an obviously insane idea, like selling Basic to computer hobbyists in 1975 or selling books on the Internet in 1994.

An outstanding paper that applies Rene Girard's Mimetic Theory to Financial Bubbles. It looks at a series of case studies, from the 1840s railway mania to the ICO boom and collapse, and even to present-day mimesis-driven market distortions.