tulipmania

Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles
by William Quinn and John D. Turner
Published 5 Aug 2020

These criteria are very close to those used by Goetzmann, ‘Bubble investing’ and Greenwood et al., ‘Bubbles for Fama’. 38. Greenwood et al., ‘Bubbles for Fama’. 39. See Posthumus, ‘The tulip mania’. 40. Goldgar, Tulipmania. 41. Garber, ‘Tulipmania’; Garber, Famous First Bubbles. 42. Thompson, ‘The tulipmania’. 43. Mackay, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions, 2nd edition. 44. Goldgar, Tulipmania, p. 6. 45. Goldgar, Tulipmania, pp. 6–7. 46. Englund, ‘The Swedish banking crisis’; Moe, Solheim and Vale, ‘The Norwegian banking crisis’; Nyberg, ‘The Finnish banking crisis’; Radlet et al., ‘The East Asian financial crisis’. 226 NOTES TO PAGES 14–23 47.

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Fifth, several of the bubbles listed in Table 1.1 were explicitly connected to the development of new technology – railways in the 1840s, bicycles in the 1890s, automobiles, radio, aeroplanes and electrification in the 1920s and the Internet and telecommunications in the 1990s. Probably the most famous absentee from our study is the Dutch Tulipmania of 1636–7, which witnessed the rapid price appreciation of rare tulip bulbs in late 1636, followed by a 90 per cent depreciation in bulb prices in February 1637.39 This is excluded for the simple reason that the price reversal was exclusively confined to a thinly traded commodity, with no associated promotion boom and negligible economic 13 BOOM AND BUST impact.40 In other words, the Tulipmania was too unremarkable to merit inclusion. Although the wild fluctuations in price are striking, they are not unusual for markets in rare and unusual goods, particularly those predominantly used to signal status.41 In the case of the Tulipmania these fluctuations were compounded by legal ambiguity over the status of futures contracts, suggesting that the price movements may have had a somewhat mundane explanation.42 The infamy of the Tulipmania is largely the fault of Charles Mackay.43 Mackay painted the picture of a society overcome with collective insanity on the subject of tulips, where the value of some bulbs exceeded the value of luxury Amsterdam houses.

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Although the wild fluctuations in price are striking, they are not unusual for markets in rare and unusual goods, particularly those predominantly used to signal status.41 In the case of the Tulipmania these fluctuations were compounded by legal ambiguity over the status of futures contracts, suggesting that the price movements may have had a somewhat mundane explanation.42 The infamy of the Tulipmania is largely the fault of Charles Mackay.43 Mackay painted the picture of a society overcome with collective insanity on the subject of tulips, where the value of some bulbs exceeded the value of luxury Amsterdam houses. He also stressed the universality of the trade, with the general populace of Amsterdam ‘investing’ in tulip bulbs at the various taverns dotted around the city.

Tulipomania: The Story of the World's Most Coveted Flower & the Extraordinary Passions It Aroused
by Mike Dash
Published 10 Feb 2010

On the appearance and behavior of Dutch tulip traders, see both Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1962), and the more recent and more analytical A. T. van Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Value of a tulip Garber, “Tulipmania,” p. 537n, states that in 1637 each guilder contained 0.856g of gold. One gram of gold was thus worth 1.17 guilders. A Viceroy bulb sold at auction in Alkmaar on February 5 fetched 146 guilders per gram, making it worth 125 times its weight in gold. Richest man Israel, Dutch Republic, p. 348. Tulip fortunes Garber, “Tulipmania,” p. 550. Chapter 2. The Valleys of Tien Shan The early history of the tulip is very largely obscure. Its Asian origins are discussed by Turhan Baytop, “The Tulip in Istanbul During the Ottoman Period,” in Michiel Roding and Hans Theunissen, eds., The Tulip: A Symbol of Two Nations (Utrecht & Istanbul: Turco-Dutch Friendship Association, 1993), and the enthusiasm for wild tulips in Persia rather briefly by Wilfrid Blunt, Tulipomania (London: Penguin, 1950).

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Continuing trade in tulips Krelage, Bloemenspeculatie in Nederland, pp. 97–110; Krelage, Drie Eeuwen Bloembollenexport, pp. 15–18; Segal, Tulips Portrayed, p. 17; Mundy, Travels of Peter Mundy, vol. 4, p. 75; Garber, “Tulipmania,” pp. 550–53. Aert Huybertsz. Posthumus, “Die Speculatie in Tulpen” (1927), pp. 82–83. Haarlem as the center of the later bulb trade Krelage, Bloemenspeculatie in Nederland, pp. 102–04; Krelage, Drie Eeuwen Bloembollenexport, pp. 9–11. Desiderata of van Oosting and van Kampen Cited in Segal, Tulips Portrayed, p. 11, and Hall, Book of the Tulip, pp. 48–49. The hyacinth trade Krelage, Bloemenspeculatie in Nederland, pp. 142–96, and Krelage, Drie Eeuwen Bloembollenexport, pp. 13, 645–55; Garber, “Tulip-mania,” pp. 553–54; Bulgatz, Ponzi Schemes, pp. 109–14.

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These totals exclude Turkish species, which by the eighteenth century numbered more than thirteen hundred by themselves. Early tulip lovers Krelage, Bloemenspeculatie in Nederland, pp. 23–24; Krelage, Drie Eeuwen Bloembollenexport, pp. 6, 17. The tulip in France Krelage, Bloemenspeculatie in Nederland, p. 29; Munting, Naauwkeurige Beschryving der Aardgewassen, pp. 907–11; Garber, “Tulip-mania,” p. 543. Although dealt with by contemporary garden writers, the history of this early French tulip mania is still obscure and would probably repay some original research. The rose as empress of the garden Zumthor, Daily Life in Rembrandt’s Holland, p. 49. The tulip connoisseurs Stadsbibliotheek, Haarlem, Passe, Een Cort Verhael van den Tulipanen, p. 4; Krelage, Drie Eeuwen Bloembollenexport, p. 6.

Capitalism 4.0: The Birth of a New Economy in the Aftermath of Crisis
by Anatole Kaletsky
Published 22 Jun 2010

If anything, the effects of these new technologies on every part of the world economy have turned out to be more far-reaching than anyone in 1999 predicted. A broadly similar argument can even by made about Tulipmania and the South Sea Bubble. The purchase of a single tulip bulb for the price of a townhouse in Amsterdam, at that time the richest city in the world, seems like a symptom of certifiable madness, yet even this behavior appears less bizarre when placed in its historic context. Tulipmania marked the emergence of the first free-enterprise capitalist economy in history. In the early seventeenth century, during the Eighty Years’ War of 1568- 1648, the predominantly Protestant bourgeoisie of the United Dutch States were fighting for their freedom from an oppressive and obstinately feudal Spanish monarchy.

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The monopoly was granted by the victorious British Crown to the London-based South Sea Company, whose establishment in 1711 symbolized the emergence of England as the world’s dominant economic power. As in the case of Tulipmania, this structural transformation in economic conditions gave rise to an unsustainable financial boom, the South Sea Bubble. This bubble burst in 1720, exposing colossal fraud and political corruption. It brought ruin to many notable British business and aristocratic families. Financial acumen and analytical brainpower were no defense against the bubble’s devastation, as Newton discovered. The indiscriminate nature of its financial devastation may explain why the South Sea Bubble, along with Tulipmania, is usually considered the quintessential case of the financial markets’ detachment from reality, a view expressed in the title of probably the most famous book on the history of finance, Charles MacKay’s Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.

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Some declare that the lessons of previous experience are irrelevant because the Internet or globalization or the credit-crunch has changed everything: Technology shares will rise to infinity; all the goods in the world will be made in China; credit will contract or expand forever. Others insist that all cycles are the same. The boom-bust cycle in housing was essentially the same as the speculation in technology stocks in the 1990s, the Japanese bubble in the 1980s, and Tulipmania in seventeenth-century Holland. But why should we adopt either of these extreme views? Some features of human life do permanently change history, for example, the abolition of slavery, the invention of antibiotics, or the harnessing of electricity or computer power. Others, ranging from love and hate to financial panic, are repeated in every generation with uncanny precision.

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond
by Chris Burniske and Jack Tatar
Published 19 Oct 2017

The crash did not set off a recession throughout the economy, which was one saving grace of Tulipmania. It was the common people, less experienced in investing, that had been swept up in the madness of the crowd who were the hardest hit. Fights over the amount due per contract ensued. A little over a year after the bubble burst, the Dutch government stepped in to declare that the contracts could be settled for 3.5 percent of their initial value. While a marked improvement over paying the full contract, 3.5 percent of the most expensive tulip would still require a year’s work for some unlucky citizens. The Speculation of Crowds Comes to Cryptoassets As with Tulipmania, cryptoassets are vulnerable to the speculation of crowds.

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The four characteristics of persuasion Le Bon mentions only exacerbate the situation: Affirmation leads the credulous to more strongly believe in their strategies when the market continues to go up, and that thinking spreads like a contagion. This pattern is repeated, again and again, as the speculators chase the returns of the most prestigious of assets. Unfortunately, when the market turns and the prestige is gone, the contagion of terror spreads just as quickly through the speculative crowd. Tulipmania The most famous instance of mass speculation in a commodity happened in the Dutch Republic in the 1630s. As with most periods of mass speculation, the time was right. With their merchants fueling trade, the Dutch enjoyed the highest salaries of any in Europe, financial innovation was in the air, and money was free-flowing.

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Speculators, therefore, passed the tulips around like hot potatoes, hoping they could sell them to the next speculator for a higher price, until the last person was left with a claim on a dead tulip. Tulips had promised value since their introduction to Europe in the mid-1500s, but it was not until 1634 and the spread of the virus that prices increased exponentially, causing what is commonly referred to as Tulipmania. What began with small groups of speculators turned into crowds of speculators, as outsiders from other countries were drawn to Dutch tulip markets upon hearing stories of the immense riches to be gained. Meanwhile, the experienced withdrew from participation or shunned the tulip trade, as explained by Chancellor: The wealthy amateur bulb collectors, who had long shown a readiness to pay vast sums for the rarer varieties, withdrew their custom as prices began to soar, while the great Amsterdam merchants continued investing their trading profits in town houses, East India stock, or bills of exchange—for them, tulips remained merely an expression of wealth, not a means to that end.12 Since much of a tulip’s life is spent as a bulb and not a blossom, it lends itself to a futures market, which the Dutch called a windhandel, or the wind trade.13 A futures market is where a buyer and a seller agree to the future price of a good.

Smart Money: How High-Stakes Financial Innovation Is Reshaping Our WorldÑFor the Better
by Andrew Palmer
Published 13 Apr 2015

The Eurobond market, the first modern international capital market, was turbocharged by a tax imposed by President John Kennedy designed to discourage Americans from investing in foreign securities; international firms turned to the nascent European market for dollar-denominated borrowing instead. Going further back, the “tulipmania” that infected seventeenth-­century Dutch buyers, sending the price of tulip bulbs spiraling beyond the cost of a town house in Amsterdam, is usually put down to speculative irrationality. But the very steep increase in prices in early 1637 came about when the government ratified a change in contracts that meant tulip buyers were no longer obliged to buy tulips at an agreed price in the future.

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This change was the equivalent of altering a futures contract into an options contract and gave investors a much greater incentive to load up on tulips, knowing that they could pay a small fee to cancel the contract if prices did not rise high enough to make it worthwhile exercising the option. Prices soared as a result. In the words of one scholar, the tulipmania was little more than a “contractual artifact.” The current burst of regulatory activity is bound to have similar unanticipated effects on how money moves around the financial system.27 The idea of another era of financial wizardry is unlikely to thrill many people. The understandable concern is that the last bout of innovation—all those credit-default swaps and complex securitized mortgages—ended pretty badly.

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In Britain there was the South Sea bubble of 1720, a crash in the share price of the South Sea Company, which had been granted a monopoly to trade with South America. That same year, French investors were hit by the collapse of the so-called Mississippi scheme, under which they subscribed to the shares of a company set up to exploit economic opportunities in what is now the United States. Before that there was the seventeenth-century “tulipmania” in Holland. The ancient world also had its share of financial panics. The Roman Empire endured a crisis in AD 33, when the enforcement of orders requiring that a certain proportion of money be invested at home prompted lenders to call in loans elsewhere, causing widespread financial distress. Finance may propel us forward, but it is also liable to cause a lot of trouble.2 This book’s contention is that financial innovation is an essential component of attempts to address the world’s big problems.

Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition
by Kindleberger, Charles P. and Robert Z., Aliber
Published 9 Aug 2011

Building of the complex network reached a peak in 1659 and 1665, but de Vries connected the project to the tulipmania and to the explosive growth of the Dutch economy between 1622 and 1660.5 Jonathan Israel wrote that the tulipmania should be viewed against the background of the general boom and as a mania of ‘small-town dealers, tavern-keepers and horticulturalists’ while for the most part the wealthy made money in other ways.6 This perspective undermines one of Peter Garber’s points that there could have been no tulipmania because there was no depression once bulb prices declined.7 The Dutch economy slowed in the 1640s before putting on a tremendous growth spurt from 1650 to 1672, which involved luxury housing, civic buildings, and paintings.

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The earliest manias discussed in the first edition of this book were the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles of 1719–20. The earliest manias analyzed in this edition are the Kipper- und Wipperzeit, a monetary crisis (1619–22) that occurred at the outbreak of the Thirty Years War, and the much-discussed ‘tulipmania’ of 1636–37. The view that the trade in tulip bulbs in the Dutch Republic constituted a bubble followed from widespread recognition, even at the time, that exotic specimens of tulips are difficult to breed, but once bred propagate easily – and hence eventually their prices would decline sharply.3 The early-historical treatment focusses on European experiences.

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In contrast, the bursting of the bubbles leads to a downturn in economic activity and is often associated with the failure of financial institutions, frequently on a massive scale. The failure of these institutions disrupts the channels of credit and thus contributes to the slowdown in economic activity and the sluggishness in the economic recovery. Tulipmania The price of Dutch tulips increased by several hundred percent in the autumn of 1636 – and the increases in the prices of the more exotic species of bulbs were even larger. Some analysts, especially those with a strong commitment to rationality and market efficiency, have questioned whether the use of the term bubble is appropriate to describe the increases in tulip prices.

Willful: How We Choose What We Do
by Richard Robb
Published 12 Nov 2019

In at least some cases, they’re right. For instance, most people believe that seventeenth-century Dutch traders lost their minds, bidding up the price of tulips to incredible heights and causing an economic crisis when prices finally collapsed. According to Peter Garber’s 1989 article debunking tulipmania, modern references to the tulip craze are based on a brief description from 1852 that drew in turn on unreliable secondary sources. Garber’s investigation shows that the price of rare bulbs did soar from 1634 to 1637, then gradually fell. But a temporary spike in prices for rare bulbs was a normal phenomenon for tulips as it was for hyacinths.

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“From Anticipations to Present Bias: A Theory of Forward-Looking Preferences.” Working paper, October 31, 2014. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/36f1/2ace17c4cb86a086902d1ac27e475f8c945d.pdf (accessed February 2, 2019). ———. “A Theory of Intergenerational Altruism.” Econometrica 85, no. 4 (2017): 1175–1218. Garber, Peter M. “Tulipmania.” Journal of Political Economy 97, no. 3 (1989): 535–560. Gazzaniga, Michael S. The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas. New York: Harper Collins, 2005. Guthrie, A. B., Jr. Shane. Motion picture. Directed by George Stevens. Paramount Pictures, 1953. Hayek, Friedrich A. “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

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See also purposeful choice rationalization, 15, 43–44, 55, 159–162, 178, 194–195 readiness potential, 161 real estate, 80 redistribution, 109 reference points, 168 regret, 127–128, 129 religious faith, 49–50, 116 remorse, 128–129 repeat dealing, 105 repentance, 128 reputation, 105–106, 134, 183 retirement, 19, 41, 185, 206 Ricardo, David: personal investments, 71, 205 theory of comparative advantage, 185 risk: above-market returns linked to, 70 aversion to, 17, 51, 96, 168, 199 diversification and, 64 in efficient market hypothesis, 69, 70 in human-life valuation, 139 low asset prices linked to, 96 modeling of, 69, 76 rivalry, 201 Rockefeller, John D., 211–212n12 Rotten Kid Theorem, 108–110, 125 Russell, Bertrand, 62 salience, 29 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 128–129 satisficing, 42–43 Saul of Tarsus, 63 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 5, 161, 209n5 Schwartz, Barry, 172 scientific knowledge, 61 scientific method, 49–50, 53 search costs, 9 Searle, John, 141–142 Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), 16 selfish altruism, 104, 105–106, 109, 123, 125, 135 Seligman, Martin, 202 Sen, Amartya, 169 Shafir, Eldar, 174 Shane (film), 169 Sharpe, William, 65 short-term trading, 78 Siddhartha Gautama, 63 Simon, Herbert, 42 Singer, Peter, 110 Smith, Adam, 73, 82, 112, 171 Smith, Al, 211–212n12 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 47 social cost, 28–29, 133 social norms, 104, 106–108, 123 social relations, 28 rational choice explanations of, 104 Sodom and Gomorrah, 117–118 “soft selling,” 170 sovereign wealth funds, 74 speed limits, 138–140 spite, 126–127 spontaneity, 19–20, 202 altruistic, 28–29, 114–115, 119, 203 in spite, 127 stable preferences, 33, 115, 147, 207, 208 status symbols, 31 staying in the game, 179–181 stock-picking, 64–66 Strangers Drowning (MacFarquhar), 214n6 strategic competition, 125 structured credit, 15, 93 Strulovici, Bruno H., 217n1 Sturges, Preston, 7 subprime mortgages, 96–97 substitution effect, 187 survivor bias, 180 Taylor, Michael, 133 terrorism, 126 Thaler, Richard, 33–34 Thanet Offshore Wind, 83–90 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), 43 tit-for-tat, in repeated games, 105 transaction costs, 64, 70, 78 transitivity of preferences, 158–159 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume), 209n5 “tricky profit,” 18–21 trolley problem, 133, 135–137 tulipmania, 212n1 Tversky, Amos, 168, 174 Twain, Mark, 60 ultimatum game, 107–108, 207 uncertainty, about future, 25, 153, 181–185 unique events, 70–71, 72–73, 74, 94 United Kingdom, 181 Energy Ministry of, 88 unemployment, 186 unemployment benefits, 188 university endowments, 74 University of Chicago, 8–9 unobserved care, 108, 112–113, 124, 125–126 utilitarianism, 135–136, 197–198 utility, 5–6, 18, 153–154, 196 vaccination, 58–59 values, 190–191 Van Gogh, Vincent, 79 Veblen, Thorstein, 167 veil of ignorance, 136 vengeance, 125, 126 venture capital, 27, 91–92, 100 Vestas Wind Systems, 84–88 video games, 180 Viner, Jacob, 219n2 Vogt, John, 117 wages, 154, 186, 187–188 waiting in line, 179 walk-a-thons, 178 “warm glow effect,” 114 wealth effect, 187 Wellington (Arthur Wellesley), Duke of, 71 Whitman, Walt, 50 The Will to Power (Nietzsche), 209n5 Williams, Bernard, 7 wind energy, 82–90 work-sports, 191–192 The World as Will and Idea (Schopenhauer), 209n5 Yavapai Indians, 133 Zarnowski, Frank, 191 Zeckhauser, Richard, 70–72 zero risk bias, 24

Viruses: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
by Crawford, Dorothy H.
Published 27 Jul 2011

Both men were aided by smallpox, possibly combined with other microbes, that concomitantly killed up to half the population, leaving the survivors so confused and demoralized that the Spanish invaders had easy victories. Plant viruses have also had their moments of glory, and one such occurred during the 17th century when ‘tulipmania’ hit Holland. Tulips had recently been imported from Turkey and Dutch plant breeders were busy developing new varieties, including ‘broken tulips’ with white stripes on their flowers called ‘colour breaks’. Owning such a plant became a status symbol in Holland, where between 1634 and 1637 a single bulb of the prized ‘Admiral van Enkhuiijsen’ variety could change hands for up to 5,400 guilders, the cost of an Amsterdam town house and 15 times a labourer’s annual wage.

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Fears’, Publisher’s acknowledgements The Microbe from More Beasts (for worse children) by Hilaire Belloc © Hilaire Belloc reproduced by permission of PFD (www.pfd.co.uk) on behalf of the Estate of Hilaire Belloc Index A aciclovir 71, 115 AIDS 16, 36, 38–9, 43, 73–7, 93–4, 112–13, 115 see also, HIV air travel 48 airborne viruses 2, 38, 52–94 antibodies 31–3, 61–2, 76, 80, 113, 118, 127 antigens 30–1, 40–1, 78, 110, 112 antiretroviral drugs 12, 38, 77, 114–16, 126 antiviral agents 12, 71, 76, 80, 82, 114–18, 125 aphids 22, 27, 122 apoptosis 10 archaea 13, 16–19, 28–9 B cells (lymphocytes) 31–2, 72, 91, 93, 95 bacteria 2–4, 6–7, 13–14, 16–23, 28–9, 63, 114–15, 117 Bang, Oluf 83 barrier nursing 38, 44, 64, 130 bats 43–5, 107, 125 Beijerinck, Martinus 3 Belloc, Hilaire 1–2 biological weapons 128–30 bird flu (H5N1) BT virusle c34, 40–2, 126 blood and blood products 26–8 coronary heart disease 128 diagnosis 118 hepatitis 28, 78, 81–2 herpesviruses 91 HIV 38–9, 74–7, 113–14 leukaemia 88, 90 placenta, transmission through the 31, 56, 71 bluetongue virus 47 breast-feeding 31, 38, 69, 88, 90 bronchiolitis 57 Burkitt, Denis 91–1 C cancer 35, 63, 66, 72, 76, 78, 81–101, increas virusle c112, 127–8, 130 capsids 4, 8, 15 CCR5 29, 40 CD4 T-cells 8, 31, 33, 40, 74–6, 113 CD8 T-cells 31 cell culture 83–4, 86–8, 92, 96–8, 108, 117–18 cervical cancer 86, 98–100, 112 chickenpox (Varicella zoster virus), 51, 53, 56–7, 68, 70–1 childhood infections 51–62, 69–70, 72, 81, around 5,000 to 10,000 years agoto virusle c91–2, 94, 109 cholera 2, 22–3 chronic fatigue syndrome (myalgia encephalomyelitis) 126 cirrhosis 78, 80–1, 95–6 Clostridium difficile, 63 cold sores (herpes simplex) 27, 68–70, 76, 115 common cold (rhinovirus) 26–7, 53, 57–8, 108 conjunctivitis 57 coronary heart disease 128 cowpox 52, 103–5, 107 croup 57–8 cytokines 30–2, 42, 80, 117 cytomegalovirus (CMV) 68, 71, 128 _to virusle cD de Maton, George 56 death rates AIDS/HIV 36, 38, 74 cancer 84, 99 flu 42 hepatitis 116 measles 55–6, 64 rabies 108 respiratory viruses 57–8 Rinderpest 62 rotaviruses 59 SARS 36–8 smallpox 103–5, 110–11, 120–1, 130 definition of virus 4 defences to viruses 28–33, 65 dengue fever 27, 45–7 diabetes 32 diagnosis 117–18, 125 DNA 2, 4, 7–15, 19, 33, 40, 65, 67, 74, 81, 86, 96–101, 106, 112, 115, 118, 131 drugs 12, 38, 70, 76–7, 82, 93, 114–18, 125, 129 E Ebola and Ebola-like viruses 44, 63, 109, 129–30 electron microscopes 4, 14, 117–18 elimination or eradication of viruses 54–6, 62, 102–11, 130 Ellerman, Wilhelm 83 emerging virus infections 34–50, 125–7 Emiliania huxleyi, 19 encephalitis 44–5, 49, 56, 66, 71, 78, 118 enteroviruses 61, 126 epidemics 35–7, 40–1, 44, 51–60, 103–5, 108, 111, 116, 120, 123 Epstein-Barr virus 27, 32, 66, 68, 72, 77, 91–4, 127–8 eukaryotes 13, 17–19 evolution 11–15, 17–19, 23, os virusle c29, 66–7, 80, 119 F faecal-oral transmission 52–3, 59–64, 78, 109 farming revolution 51–2, 119 fighting viruses 25–33 flesh-eating bug (Streptococcus, pyogenes), 63 flu 3, 18, 26, 32, 34, 40–2, 48, 51, 53, 58, 115–17, 125–6, 131 foot and mouth disease 48–9 future of viruses 125–31 G Gallo, Robert 87 gastroenteritis 59–60, 62 genetic material or genome, chre0S4–20, 41, 60, 76, 84–7, 91, 94–8, 131 see also, DNA; RNA genital herpes 68, 69–70 German measles (rubella) 3, 54, 56–7, 108, 110 glandular fever (kissing disease) 27, 68, 71–2, 127–8 Global Influenza Surveillance Network 125–6 gods 54, 120 Gregg, Norman 56 Gulf War syndrome 129 gut, viruses in the 21–2, 26–7, 30, 52–3, 59–64 H Hamiltonella defensa 22 around 5,000 to 10,000 years agoto virusle c healthcare workers 28, 36–7, 114 Hendra virus 45 hepatitis A (HAV) 15, 78, 95 hepatitis B (HBV) 15, 27–8, 31, 66, 78–9, 81–2, 95–6, 110, 112, 116–17 hepatitis C (HCV) 15, 31, 66, 78–81, 95–7, 116–17 hepatitis D (HDV) 78, 95 hepatitis E (HEV) 78, 95 hepatitis viruses 15, 27–8, 31, 66, 77–82, 95– around 5,000 to 10,000 years agoto virusle c7, 110, 112, 116–17 herpesviruses 4, 6, 27, 66–72, 76, 77, 90–5, 100, 115, 119, 126, 128 HIV antiviral drugs 114–16 antiretroviral drugs 12, 38, 114–15 blood and blood products 38–9, 74–7, 113–14 central nervous system 76–7 death rates 38, 74 immune system 8–12, 29, 33, 39, 71, 73, 76, 93, 113 Kaposi sarcoma-associated virus (KSHV) 66, 68, 72, 91, 94–5 mutations 13, 33 non-sexual transmission routes 38–9 origins 39, 43, 73 receptors 8 resistance 29 sexual transmission 27–8, 38–9, 74 stages 74–5 tumour viruses 93–4 vaccinations 112–14 worldwide effects 124–5 Hodgkin’s lymphoma 94 Hoffman, Friedrich 56 hospital-acquired or nosocomial infections 62–4 Hoyle, Fred 23 hygiene 26, 48, 52–3, 61–2 around 5,000 to 10,000 years agoto virusle c, 78, 110 I immune systems 28–33, 64–6, 70–6 avoiding immune attacks, viruses 25–6, 28–33, 86 common cold 57 hepatitis 117 HIV 8–12, 29, 33, 39, 71, 73, 76, 93, 113 immunopathology 32, 80 reservoirs, immuno-suppressed people as 130–1 tumour viruses 86, 91, 93–4, 127 vaccinations 110 immunity 28, 33, 40–2, 51, 54, 60, 64 increas virusle c–7, 70, 76, 80, 102–3 incubation period 35–8, 54, 57, 59, 63, 90, 106, 130 insects 8, 22, 26, 28, 45–7, 49, 122–3 isolation of microbes 1–3 Ivanovsky, Dmitry 3 J Jenner, Edward 102–4, 107, 110 Jesty, Benjamin 103–4 K Kaposi sarcoma-associated virus (KSHV) 66, 68, 72, 91, 94–5, 101 Koch, Robert 2 L laboratory animals 83– around 5,000 to 10,000 years agoto virusle c5 laboratory escapes 131 last universal cellular ancestor (LUCA) 13–14 latent infections 67–9 leukaemia 66, 83, 87–90, 131 liver damage 77–8, 80–1, 95–6, 116 lymphocytes 8, 30–3, 39–40, 54, 66, 72, 74–6, 80, 87, 93–4, 107, 113, 128 M Maitland, Charles 103 malaria 44, 55, 93, 114, 124 Marek’s disease 107 marine environment 17–23 Mayer, Adolf 3 measles 3, 12–13, 26, 52–7, 62, 63–4, 110–11, 124 Medawar, Peter 4 meningitis 59, 61, 118 methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus pyogenes, (MRSA) 63 microbes 1–4, 16–19, 21–3, 27–34, 45, 50–2, 66, 119–22, 128–9 microscopes 2, 4, 14, 117–18 mimivirus (microbe-mimicking virus) 4, 6, 8, 17–18 MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine 56 molecular clock hypothesis 12–13, 52 Montague, Mary Wortley 102–4 Moore, Patrick 94, 101 mortality rates see, death rates mosquitoes 27, 45, 49, 122–3 MRSA (methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus pyogenes), 63 multiple sclerosis 32, 72, 127–8 mumps 3, 53–4, 56–7, 110, 124 mutations 10–13, 29, 31, 33, 40–2, 60, 65, 76, 80, 84–7, 93–4, 106 myalgia encephalomyelitis (chronic fatigue syndrome) 126 N New World 88, 120–4 Nipah virus 45 nosocomial infections 62–4 noroviruses 26, 59–61, 63 nucleotides 11 O oceans 17–23 oncogenes 84, 86–7, 91, 93–5, 99–100 outer space 22–3 overpopulation 48–9 P pandemics 34–42, 53–4, 73, 116, 124–6, 130–1 panspermia 23 papilloma viruses 18, 66, 27, 97–100 parasites 13–14, 23, 82, 117, 119 past, viruses in the 2–4, 14–15, 38–63, 66, 83–8, 91–2, 102–24 Pasteur, Louis 2, 107–8 Peloponnesian War 120 penicillin 114–15 persistent viruses 65–82, 116–17 phages 16–17, 19–23, 26, 28–30, 66, 71, 74 photosynthesis 19–21 phytoplankton _to virusle c19–21 placenta 31, 56, 71 plankton 19–21 pneumonia 17, 36–7, 53, 55, 57–9, 71, 76 polio 61–2, 108–10 polymerase chain reaction (PCR) 118 poverty 38, 48, 74, 120, 124 pox viruses 3–4, 6, 9, 13, 52 see also, cowpox; smallpox protein 2, 4, 6, 8–9, 13–14, 18, 20, 28–30, 32, os virusle c67, 111–12, 127 provirus 9–10, 33 R rabies 4, 107–8, 110 receptors 8, 30–1, 78 recombinant vaccines 111–13 regulatory T cells 32, 80 reproduction 8–14, 20–1, 25–6 retroviruses 9–10, 12, 14, 66, 72–7, 86–8, 91, 130 see also, AIDs; HIV reverse transcriptase (RT) 9, 14, 87–8 rheumatoid arthritis 72 rhinovirus (common cold) 26– BT virusle c7, 53, 57–8, 108 Rinderpest virus 52, 62 rise in infections 38, 45, 47–50 RNA 4–5, 8–12, 14–15, 28–9, 41, 78, 80, 95, 118 RNAi (RNA interference) 28–9 rotaviruses 26–7, 59–60, 62, 129 Rous, Peyton 83–4, 97 royalty affected by smallpox 120–1 rubella (German measles) 3, 54, 56–7, 108, 110 S Sabin, Albert BT virusle c100 Salk, Jonas 109 SARS coronavirus 16, 34–8, 40, 43–4, 48, 63, 125 sexual transmission 27–8, 38–9, 69, 74, 81, 91, 98–9 shape of viruses 4, 14–15, 17 shingles 57, 70–1 Shope, Richard 97 silent infections 37–9, 61, 63, 66, 69–73, 77, 81, 90, 95, 106 size of viruses 4, 6, 14, 17, 21 smallpox 3, 13, 29, 52–3, 102–7, 110–11, 119–21, 124, 129–30 squamous epithelial cells 97–9 structure of viruses 4, 5, 15, 17, 117 subacute sclerosing pan encephalitis (SSPE) 66 swine flu (H1N1) 34, 41–2, 48, 116, 125–6 syphilis 2, 28 T Takatsuki, Kiyoshi 87–8 Tamiflu 116 T-cells 8, 31–3, 39–40, 66, 72, 74– around 5,000 to 10,000 years agoto virusle c6, 80, 87–90, 93–4, 107, 113, 127–8 terrorism 129 tobacco mosaic disease 3–4 tropical spastic paraparesis (non-malignant myelopathy) 87 TTV 65–6 tuberculosis 2, 18, 76 tulipmania 121–2 tumour viruses 35, 66, 72, 76, 78, 81–101, 127–8, 131 turtle papillomavirus 18 V vaccinations 12, 33, 54–7, 61–4, 80–2, 96, 99– Expand your collection of VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS 1. Classics 2. Music 3. Buddhism 4. Literary Theory 5. Hinduism 6. Psychology 7. Islam 8.

Lonely Planet Amsterdam
by Lonely Planet

Amsterdam Tulip MuseumMUSEUM ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %020-421 00 95; www.amsterdamtulipmuseum.com; Prinsengracht 116; adult/child €5/3; h10am-6pm; j13/14/17 Westermarkt) Allow around half an hour at the diminutive Amsterdam Tulip Museum, which offers a nifty overview of the history of the country's favourite bloom. Through exhibits, timelines and two short films (in English), you'll learn how Ottoman merchants encountered the flowers in the Himalayan steppes and began commercial production in Turkey, how fortunes were made and lost during Dutch 'Tulipmania' in the 17th century, and how bulbs were used as food during WWII. You'll also discover present-day growing and harvesting techniques. There's a great collection of tulip vases designed to accommodate separate stems, and a gift shop overflowing with floral souvenirs. Amsterdam Cheese MuseumMUSEUM ( MAP GOOGLE MAP ; %020-331 66 05; www.cheesemuseumamsterdam.com; Prinsengracht 112; h9am-7pm; j13/14/17 Westermarkt)F It's a tourist ploy, but a good-humoured one.

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Louis XIV of France seized the opportunity to invade the Low Countries two decades later, and the period of prosperity known as the Golden Age ended. While the city hardly went into decay or ruin, the embattled economy would take more than a century to regain its full strength. The Curious History of Tulipmania When it comes to investment frenzy, the Dutch tulip craze of 1636–37 ranks alongside the greatest economic booms and busts in history. Tulips originated as wildflowers in Central Asia and were first cultivated by the Turks, who filled their courts with these beautiful spring blooms (the word tulip derives from 'turban' due to the petals' resemblance to the headwear).

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The city's population surges to 200,000. 1602 Amsterdam becomes the site of the world's first stock exchange when the offices of the Dutch East India Company trade their own shares. 1618 World's first weekly broadsheet newspaper, the Courante uyt Italien, Duytslandt, &c., is printed in Amsterdam. Catholicism is outlawed, with clandestine worship permitted. 1636–37 Tulipmania sweeps the nation, when the flower bulbs are more valuable than a canal house. Tulip speculators get rich fast, but the market crashes and many are left bankrupt. 1664 The Dutch infamously lose the colony of New Netherland (now the northeastern US), including New Amsterdam (now New York City), to the British. 1688 William III of Orange repels the French with the help of Austria, Spain and Brandenburg.

The Long Good Buy: Analysing Cycles in Markets
by Peter Oppenheimer
Published 3 May 2020

Available at http://fessud.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Kindleberger-and-Financial-Crises-Fessud-final_Working-Paper-104.pdf 4 A comprehensive account can be found in Chancellor, E. (2000). Devil take the hindmost: A history of financial speculation. New York, NY: Plume. 5 See Thompson, E. (2007). The tulipmania: Fact or artifact? Public Choice, 130(1–2), 99–114. 6 Evans, R. (2014). How (not) to invest like Sir Isaac Newton. The Telegraph [online]. Available at https://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/investing/10848995/How-not-to-invest-like-Sir-Isaac-Newton.html 7 Cutts, R. L. (1990). Power from the ground up: Japan's land bubble.

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IMF Working Paper No. 11/76, [online]. Available at https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2016/12/31/Financial-Cycles-What-How-When-24775 Thaler, R. H., and Sunstein, C. R. (2008). Nudge: Improving decisions about health, wealth, and happiness. New York, NY: Penguin. Thompson, E. (2007). The tulipmania: Fact or artifact? Public Choice, 130(1–2), 99–114. Tooze, A. (2018). Crashed: How a decade of financial crises changed the world. London, UK: Allen Lane. Turner, A. (2017). The path to a low-carbon economy. Climate 2020 [online]. Available at https://www.climate2020.org.uk/path-low-carbon-economy Turner, G. (2003).

Market Sense and Nonsense
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 5 Oct 2012

The long history of market bubbles and crashes provides overwhelming empirical evidence that the “madness of crowds”14 can take market prices far beyond any rational level based on value and fundamentals and that market panics can result in precipitous price declines completely removed from any contemporaneous changes in fundamentals. There is a clear line from the Tulipmania of seventeenth-century Holland when “houses and lands were . . . assigned in payment of bargains made at the tulip-mart”15 to the huge demand for mortgage-based securitizations in the early 2000s when investors eagerly bought AAA-rated tranches of securitizations backed entirely by no-verification ARM subprime mortgages for the tiny yield premium they offered.

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Gain-to-pain ratio negative and Sortino ratio and volatility Short bias equity hedge funds Short selling Short volatility risk Side pockets Simons, Jim Soros, George Sortino ratio and Sharpe ratio upward bias in Speculative buying Speculators Standard deviation and expected return maximum drawdown (MDD) Stark & Company Statistical arbitrage Stewart, Jon Stock index Stock market news Stock selection Stock-picking skills Strategy overcrowding Strategy periods Strike price Strong efficiency Subprime ARMs, and foreclosure Subprime bonds Subprime borrowers Subprime loans Subprime mortgage crisis Survivorship bias Systematic trend following Tail ratio Tail risk Tech bubble Technical analysis Termination bias “The Jones Nobody Keeps Up With” (Loomis) Thematic portfolios 3Com Time magazine Track records comparison pitfalls data relevance good past performance hidden risk length of portfolio managers strategy and portfolio changes strategy efficacy Tranches Transaction slipping Trend-following strategies Tulipmania Tversky, Amos Two-direction underwater curve (2DUC) Underwater loans Unexpected developments Visible risk Visual performance evaluation net asset valuation (NAV) charts rolling window return charts underwater curve and 2DUC charts Volatility about downside and upside and downside risk high high upside impact of implied increases in and negative Sharpe ratio as risk proxy Volatility funds Volatility-based estimates, and risk evaluation Wall Street Week Weak efficiency When Genius Failed (Lowenstein) Whipsaw losses Williams, Jared Worst-case loss estimate Worst-case outcomes Ziemba, William T.

Irrational Exuberance: With a New Preface by the Author
by Robert J. Shiller
Published 15 Feb 2000

Are They Ever,” Wall Street Journal, April 19, 1999, p. 22. This article appears to have caused a mini-crash in Internet stocks the day it appeared: the NASDAQ, which is heavy on high-tech stocks, dropped 5.6% that day, representing its third largest percentage drop in ten years. 13. Peter Garber, “Tulipmania,” Journal of Political Economy, 97(3) (1989): 557. 14. Sanjoy Basu, “The Investment Performance of Common Stocks Relative to Their Price-Earnings Ratios: A Test of the Efficient Markets,” Journal of Finance, 32(3) (1977): 663–82; Eugene Fama and Kenneth French, “The Cross Section of Expected Stock Returns,” Journal of Finance, 47 (1992): 427–66.

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“Intrinsic Bubbles: The Case of Stock Prices.” American Economic Review, 81 (1991): 1189–1214. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Great Crash: 1929, 2nd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. Gale, William G., and John Sabelhaus. “Perspectives on the Household Saving Rate.” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, 1 (1999): 181–224. Garber, Peter. “Tulipmania.” Journal of Political Economy, 97(3) (1989): 535–60. ———. Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000. Geanakoplos, John. “Common Knowledge.” Journal of Economic Perspectives, 6(4) (1992): 53–82. Geanakoplos, John, Olivia S. Mitchell, and Stephen P.

The Physics of Wall Street: A Brief History of Predicting the Unpredictable
by James Owen Weatherall
Published 2 Jan 2013

Glansdorff, Paul, and Ilya Prigogine. 1971. Thermodynamic Theory of Structure, Stability and Fluctuations. London: Wiley Interscience. Gleick, J. 1987. Chaos: Making a New Science. New York: Viking. — — — . 2011. The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. Toronto: Pantheon Books. Goldgar, Anne. 2007. Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gordon, Robert J. 2002. “The Boskin Report vs. NAS At What Price: ‘The Wild vs. the Mild.’ ” Slides presented at the 2002 Conference on Research in Income and Wealth. Available at http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon/BoskinvsNAS.ppt

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“Bachelier and His Times: A Conversation with Bernard Bru.” Finance and Stochastics 5 (1): 3–32. Thaler, Richard H., ed. 1993. Advances in Behavioral Finance, vol. 1. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. — — — , ed. 2005. Advances in Behavioral Finance, vol. 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Thompson, Earl. 2007. “The Tulipmania: Fact or Artifact?” Public Choice 130 (1): 99–114. Thorp, Edward O. 1961. “A Favorable Strategy for Twenty-One.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 47 (1): 110–12. — — — . 1966. Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty One. New York: Vintage Books. — — — . 1984.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 10 Jan 2011

It was this mosaic that helped to trigger the wild speculation in tulip bulbs. The virus caused the tulip petals to develop contrasting colored stripes or “flames.” The Dutch valued highly these infected bulbs, called bizarres. In a short time, popular taste dictated that the more bizarre a bulb, the greater the cost of owning it. Slowly, tulipmania set in. At first, bulb merchants simply tried to predict the most popular variegated style for the coming year, much as clothing manufacturers do in gauging the public’s taste in fabric, color, and hemlines. Then they would buy an extra-large stockpile to anticipate a rise in price. Tulip-bulb prices began to rise wildly.

…

One of these revisionist historians, Peter Garber, has suggested that tulip-bulb pricing in seventeenth-century Holland was far more rational than is commonly believed. Garber makes some good points, and I do not mean to imply that there was no rationality at all in the structure of bulb prices during the period. The Semper Augustus, for example, was a particularly rare and beautiful bulb and, as Garber reveals, was valued greatly even in the years before the tulipmania. Moreover, Garber’s research indicates that rare individual bulbs commanded high prices even after the general collapse of bulb prices, albeit at levels that were only a fraction of their peak prices. But Garber can find no rational explanation for such phenomena as a twenty-fold increase in tulip-bulb prices during January of 1637 followed by an even larger decline in prices in February.

Surviving AI: The Promise and Peril of Artificial Intelligence
by Calum Chace
Published 28 Jul 2015

The reason was (again) the under-estimation of the difficulties of the tasks being addressed, and also the fact that desktop computers and what we now call servers overtook mainframes in speed and power, rendering very expensive legacy machines redundant. The boom and bust phenomenon was familiar to economists, with famous examples being Tulipmania in 1637 and the South Sea Bubble in 1720. It has also been a feature of technology introduction since the industrial revolution, seen in canals, railways and telecoms, as well as in the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. The second AI winter thawed in the early 1990s, and AI research has been increasingly well funded since then.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing (Eleventh Edition)
by Burton G. Malkiel
Published 5 Jan 2015

It was this mosaic that helped to trigger the wild speculation in tulip bulbs. The virus caused the tulip petals to develop contrasting colored stripes or “flames.” The Dutch valued highly these infected bulbs, called bizarres. In a short time, popular taste dictated that the more bizarre a bulb, the greater the cost of owning it. Slowly, tulipmania set in. At first, bulb merchants simply tried to predict the most popular variegated style for the coming year, much as clothing manufacturers do in gauging the public’s taste in fabric, color, and hemlines. Then they would buy an extra-large stockpile to anticipate a rise in price. Tulip-bulb prices began to rise wildly.

…

One of these revisionist historians, Peter Garber, has suggested that tulip-bulb pricing in seventeenth-century Holland was far more rational than is commonly believed. Garber makes some good points, and I do not mean to imply that there was no rationality at all in the structure of bulb prices during the period. The Semper Augustus, for example, was a particularly rare and beautiful bulb and, as Garber reveals, was valued greatly even in the years before the tulipmania. Moreover, Garber’s research indicates that rare individual bulbs commanded high prices even after the general collapse of bulb prices, albeit at levels that were only a fraction of their peak prices. But Garber can find no rational explanation for such phenomena as a twentyfold increase in tulip-bulb prices during January of 1637 followed by an even larger decline in prices in February.

How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities
by John Cassidy
Published 10 Nov 2009

But when the subprime crisis began, and the market for mortgages froze up, the firm’s holdings of dubious home loans, nearly all of which were waiting to be securitized, brought it to the brink of collapse. Mozilo’s fears turned out to be well founded, but trapped as he was in the logic of rational irrationality, he hadn’t done anything about them. The third ever-present factor in speculative bubbles is crowd psychology. From Tulipmania to Florida in the 1920s to the dot-com mania, overconfidence, disaster myopia, and copycat behavior were perhaps the defining attributes of what transpired. Each of these things was also strongly in evidence during the later stages of the housing boom, when a remarkable consensus emerged that American home prices could move in only one direction: up.

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Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program Tennessee, University of Tett, Gillian Texaco Texas, University of, Austin Texas Instruments Texas Pacific Group Thailand Thain, John Thaler, Richard Thatcher, Margaret TheGlobe.com Theory of Games and Economic Behavior (von Neumann and Morgenstern) Theory of Moral Sentiments, The (Smith) “Theory of Specualtion, The” (Bachelier) Theory of Unemployment, The (Pigou) 3M Corporation thrift, paradox of Thrift Supervision, Office of Thucydides Thünen, Johann Heinrich von Time Warner Titman, Sheridan Toshiba Corporation Toyota Motor Corporation trade, free “Tragedy of the Commons” (Hardin) Treasury bonds Treasury Department, U.S. Treatise on Money, A (Keynes) Treatise on Probability, A (Keynes) Trichet, Jean-Claude Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) T. Rowe Price Tucker, Albert Tudor Fund Tufts University tulipmania Turning Point, The (Shmelev and Popov) Tversky, Amos Tyco Electronics Corporation UBS Financial Services United Kingdom Financial Services Authority Friedman in Hayek in health care in India Office Millennium Bridge project in moral philosophy in nineteenth century stimulus packages in Treasury of United Nations “Use of Knowledge in Society, The” (Hayek) U.S.

Crisis Economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance
by Nouriel Roubini and Stephen Mihm
Published 10 May 2010

.: Princeton University Press, 2009). 20 Before the rise of capitalism: Reinhart and Rogoff, This Time Is Different, 86-89, 101-11, 174-81. 20 The Chinese pioneered: Peter Bernholz, Monetary Regimes and Inflation: History, Economic and Political Relationships (Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar, 2003), 53. 20 “tulip mania”: See, for example, Peter M. Garber, “Tulipmania,” Journal of Political Economy 97 (1989): 535-60; Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 20 John Law’s Mississippi Company: John Law, A Full and Impartial Account of the Company of Mississippi (London, 1720); Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007). 21 South Sea Company: Rik G.

Start It Up: Why Running Your Own Business Is Easier Than You Think
by Luke Johnson
Published 31 Aug 2011

In particular, you should consider your options before jumping onto bandwagon businesses. To that end I can recommend Devil Take the Hindmost by Edward Chancellor (Macmillan, 2000), for its fine introduction to the subject of wild booms and busts through the ages. The author is an ex-Lazard merchant banker who understands his material. His book covers a grand sweep from the Dutch tulip-mania of the 1630s to the Japanese bubble economy of the 1980s. It shows that when it comes to making investments, we are doomed to endlessly repeat our mistakes. Every era brings forth innovations, which offer great reward and attract risk capital. The substantial initial profits encourage a rush of capital and company valuations get out of control.

Warren Buffett Accounting Book: Reading Financial Statements for Value Investing (Warren Buffett's 3 Favorite Books)
by Stig Brodersen and Preston Pysh
Published 30 Apr 2014

Once again, this bubble popped and the situation corrected once price and value had no sustainable relationship to each other. Why do these bubbles keep occurring? Have we learnt nothing from history? The most obvious answer must be no. In 1637, we had the first recording of an economic bubble. It was in the Netherlands when “Tulipmania” occurred. At the peak of the bubble, a tulip bulb was traded at the price of 10 years’ annual income for a worker, far greater than the value of a tulip bulb. Today we might have a laugh at the expense of the poor Dutch people who went into economic ruin, but as we have seen twice in the last decade, humanity has learned very little from historic economic bubbles.

Why Stock Markets Crash: Critical Events in Complex Financial Systems
by Didier Sornette
Published 18 Nov 2002

The interesting part is that Garber views the tulip mania “myth” as originating from a rumor that was progressively strengthened by successive authors using it for their own agenda, such as to support moralistic attacks against “excessive speculation” and, in modern times, to plead for government regulation: “the tulipmania episode    is simply a rhetorical device used to put forward an argument that    the existence of positi ve feedback s 111 tulipmania proves that markets are crazy. A curious disturbance in a particular modern market can then be attributed to crazy behavior, so perhaps the market needs to be more severely regulated” [153, p. 11.], While Garber’s book has been hailed by a series of financial economists with high reputations, economist C.

Before Babylon, Beyond Bitcoin: From Money That We Understand to Money That Understands Us (Perspectives)
by David Birch
Published 14 Jun 2017

Futures trading in the Amsterdam markets had its origin in the sixteenth century and futures were traded on the Amsterdam exchange just like any other commodity. Derivatives fed the tulip mania and the subsequent crash, although the reasons for the crisis and crash are not as clear as you might think. Some observers see the tulip market’s collapse as a response to financial regulation, not market fundamentals (see ‘Was tulipmania irrational?’, The Economist, 4 October 2013). Government officials, who were themselves speculating on the markets, were planning a rule change to convert futures contracts into options, which would mean that people who had undertaken to buy tulip bulbs in the future could pay a small amount to cancel the contracts if the price was not in their favour.

The Clash of the Cultures
by John C. Bogle
Published 30 Jun 2012

However, a substantial portion—perhaps one-half or more—reflects risk seeking, or rank speculation, another component of the whirling dervish of today’s trading activity. Most of this excessive speculation is built on a foundation of sand, hardly a sound basis for our financial well-being. Sooner or later—as the great speculative manias of the past such as Tulipmania and the South Sea Bubble remind us—speculation will return to its proper and far more modest role in our financial markets. I’m not sure just when or how, but the population of investors will one day come to recognize the self-defeating nature of speculation, whether on Wall Street or in a casino.

The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square
by James Traub
Published 1 Jan 2004

The logic was no different than it had been in the twenties, when an adman had calculated that a spectacular could be erected for fourteen cents per thousand viewers; now, through some extremely creative math, Spectacolor, the largest sign company in Times Square, calculated that the cost-per-thousand of a Times Square sign was one-sixth to one-tenth that of a network television spot. For a brief period in the mid-nineties, Times Square signage had its own tulipmania. In 1995, a group of partners at Lehman Brothers stunned the real estate world by buying the Times Tower, essentially a nineteen-story signboard, from the Banque Nationale de Paris for $27 million. Within two years the building had been sold twice, each time for double the previous sum, so that the final price tag was an astounding $110 million.

The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as if the Future Matters
by Diane Coyle
Published 21 Feb 2011

Zurich: University of Zurich, Institute for Empirical Research in Economics. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Galbraith, John Kenneth. 1952. American Capitalism—The Concept of Countervailing Power. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ———. 1958. The Affluent Society. New York: Penguin. Garber, Peter. 1989. “Tulipmania.” Journal of Political Economy 97:3, pp. 535–60. ———. 1990. “Famous First Bubbles.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 4:2, pp. 35–54. ———. 2000. Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gentzkow, Matthew. 2006. “Television and Voter Turnout.” Quarterly Journal of Economics. 121:3 (August), pp. 931–72.

Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk
by Peter L. Bernstein
Published 23 Aug 1996

LVI, No. 4 (August), pp. 279-304. Galton, Francis, 1869. Hereditary Genius: An Inquiry into Its Laws and Consequences. London: Macmillan. Abstracted in Newman, 1988a, pp. 1141-1162. Galton, Francis, 1883. Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development. London: Macmillan. Garber, Peter M., 1989. "Who Put the Mania in Tulipmania?" The Journal of Portfolio Management, Vol. 16, No. 1 (Fall), pp. 53-60. Garland, Trudi Hammel, 1987. Fascinating Fibonaccis: Mystery and Magic in Numbers. Palo Alto, California: Dale Seymour Publications.* Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, 1994. "Utility." In The McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics, 2nd Ed., Douglas Greenwald, ed.

The Levelling: What’s Next After Globalization
by Michael O’sullivan
Published 28 May 2019

From a relative wealth point of view, this again helps those with existing securities portfolios, though it must be said that investors deserve some compensation for holding risky assets in uncertain times. Underlying this, in May 2017, when ECB president Draghi testified on quantitative easing to the Dutch Parliament, he was presented with a solar-powered tulip (by Pieter Duisenberg, son of the first ECB president, Wim Duisenberg) to underscore to him the parallel between the tulip-mania asset price bubble of the mid-seventeenth century and the price of eurozone financial assets (government bonds). Furthermore, because valuations for asset classes like equities and corporate bonds are now so high, the future returns they produce will inevitably be limited, thereby limiting the growth in the value of pensions.

Unknown Market Wizards: The Best Traders You've Never Heard Of
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 2 Nov 2020

At the moment, about 100 years—but, ideally, I would like to go back well beyond that. Reading is part of my research. One book that I read recently is Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation by Edward Chancellor. That book talks about market bubbles going all the way back to tulipmania. Is that a good book? It’s fantastic. It’s a book that can help you develop the kind of broader historical perspective of markets and speculation that Dalio talks about. Were there any other insights that you got from your lunch with Dalio? It was valuable to understand how Dalio thought about expected value.

City: A Guidebook for the Urban Age
by P. D. Smith
Published 19 Jun 2012

Official website: <http://en.expo2015.org/ht/en/theme.html> 31. Parker (2004), 82. 32. William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081–1797 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974). 33. William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (1596–8), Act III, scene iii. 34. Clark (2009), 2. 35. Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 10. 36. Cited from Kate Newman, Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 23. 37. Syed Ali, Dubai: Gilded Cage (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 44–6. 38.

Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants
by Jane Goodall
Published 1 Apr 2013

“at the house of a wealthy family in Bruges” Ibid., 7. 68. “More than ten million” Ibid., 7. 69. “A single bulb was exchanged for a carriage” Ibid., 7. 70. “a fortune for a particularly rare bulb” Ibid., 7. 71. “gave the messenger a lavish tip” Ibid., 7. 72. “The high court ordered” Anne Goldgar, Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 243–44. CHAPTER 6 1. “gardens evolved from the ancient ‘physic gardens’ ” Patrick Taylor, “Physic Garden,” in The Oxford Companion to the Garden (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). 2.

Investment: A History
by Norton Reamer and Jesse Downing
Published 19 Feb 2016

He has said, “I discovered that I would have been caught by the 1929 debacle.”17 Even the apparent market wizard Jesse Lauriston Livermore, the Great Bear of Wall Street, who had called the top and who made substantial sums shorting stocks ahead of both the Panic of 1907 and the Crash of 1929, would see his fortune wiped out some five years later from ill-fated speculative plays. In short, the reputed prowess of those who supposedly did see the Crash coming must be reevaluated and correctly contextualized.18 There was also no reason to believe that much of the market was overtly overvalued and that 1929 was a modern Tulipmania. There is some dispersion in the consensus estimates of the average priceto-earnings (P/E) ratios of companies before the Crash. Economist Harold Bierman calculated the averages of many such studies and disagreements, ultimately concluding that the most likely average P/E was around 16.3 based on 135 major companies and industrials in the summer of 1929.

In Pursuit of the Perfect Portfolio: The Stories, Voices, and Key Insights of the Pioneers Who Shaped the Way We Invest
by Andrew W. Lo and Stephen R. Foerster
Published 16 Aug 2021

Robert Shiller, recounting the mania in our time, said that “the Dutch referred to it as a ‘windhandel,’ which, when translated directly, means ‘wind trade.’ What they meant was that the prices of those tulips were like the wind; there was nothing to them. So, it’s just air.”25 However, more recent research by Peter Garber has debunked many of the tulipmania myths.26 Many of the cited prices were based on futures contracts, which were illegal at the time and thus unenforceable. Buyers paid only a fraction of the contract price up front. Many of the purported offers for rare bulbs can be traced to moralistic pamphlets distributed at the time, basing their examples on what it might cost to enter into a futures contract at the peak of speculation rather than actual offers.

Market Wizards: Interviews With Top Traders
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 7 Feb 2012

That’s when you can buy it for a pop. But for a long-term investment, you usually have to wait a few years and let the market base. Talking about extreme bull markets, I recently read that Australia sold a 1½ acre plot in Tokyo for $450 million that they bought for $250,000 twenty-five years ago. Is Japan the tulipmania of our day? [During 1634–1636, a speculative frenzy in tulips swept Holland, causing such an enormous rise and collapse in tulip bulb prices that the event is still famous today.] I guarantee that the Japanese stock market is going to have a major collapse—possibly within the next year or two.

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis
by Julie Holland
Published 22 Sep 2010

Resources Footnotes References Contributors About the Author About Inner Traditions • Bear & Company Books of Related Interest Copyright & Permissions Foreword Lester Grinspoon, M.D. Every age has its peculiar folly; and if Charles Mackay, the author of the mid-nineteenth-century classic Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, were alive today, he would surely see “cannabinophobia” as a popular delusion along with the “tulipmania” and “witch hunts” of earlier ages. I believe that we are now at the cusp of this particular popular delusion, which to date has been responsible for the arrest of over 20 million U.S. citizens. Future historians will likely look at this epoch and recognize it as another instance of the “madness of crowds.”