Bubble Markets: The Endnotes

Early stock markets, tulips, and the South Sea Bubble.

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Transcript:

Welcome to the Endnotes, where I put all the fun facts I can’t fit into the main videos! Today, some extra bits of information from my videos about the word Average and the history of insurance — and if you haven’t seen those yet, click on the card.

In my series on “Average” I covered the origins of the insurance industry, and along the way I mentioned that the first English stockmarket started around the same time as insurance markets—in the late 17th century. But that wasn’t the world’s first stockmarket—that was established in Amsterdam in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company. And so in this video I’m going to briefly look at a couple of the consequences of that market.

With all the money coming in from the Dutch East India Company, there was a lot of money to go around in the Netherlands. And when people start getting rich, inevitably they want to have status symbols. The status symbol in this case was the Tulip which had arrived in Europe by way of Turkey, so another contribution from the Islamic world to Europe. The name itself is also from Turkish (so this time not Arabic in origin). The word tulip is etymologically related to the word turban, from the notion that the flower’s shape resembles a turban. Turkish tülbent “turban” comes in turn from Persian dulband “turban”. So the tulip became very popular in the Netherlands in the 1630s, and because the tulip bulbs took a long time to produce, demand outstripped supply, and the price of the tulip shot up. Soon enough people began to buy tulips not to plant them but as an investment, hoping to sell them on for profit, and eventually this began to happen on paper only as contracts, what we would now call futures contracts, with tulip bulbs and actual money rarely passing between them. As with all market bubbles, the high prices eventually collapsed, but this in fact seems to be the first example of a market bubble.

And then, back in England in the early 18th century, we see the first instance of market manipulation. The South Sea Company was created in a scheme to consolidate and reduce the cost of national debt. The company was granted a trade monopoly with South America, but the founders of the company themselves had no actual belief or intention that anything would come of this monopoly—it was, indeed, an out-and-out fraud! Nevertheless, people were seduced by the company’s promises and the idea of getting rich off trading with the exotic new world, and the stock price soared before inevitably crashing. Many were ruined by the collapse and many were implicated in the scheme, but ultimately the event led to the Bubble Act passed by British Parliament which forbade the formation of any other joint-stock companies unless approved by royal charter.

As always, you can hear even more etymology and history, as well as interviews with a wide range of fascinating people, on the Endless Knot Podcast, available on all the major podcast platforms as well as our other YouTube channel. Thanks for watching!