Other stories from the Tulip Bubble

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Industrial Revolution had not yet occurred in England. In the eyes of Europeans, Britain is not yet a rich country. There were some jokes circulating in the Netherlands at that time, saying that tourists from England were so rustic that they didn’t even recognize tulips. Like peeling onions and garlic, they tore apart the tulip bulbs layer by layer to look at them. Some British sailors were so ridiculous that they even ate tulip bulbs for lunch. When word spread, everyone was thinking, this thing is not that beautiful and tastes like garlic, but it is worth so much. Money? This matter spread further and further, and finally everyone thought that the price of tulips began to plummet, from more than 1,000 gold coins to more than 10 gold coins. Despite this, no one bought it. This speculative accident caused a considerable blow to the Netherlands. Within three years, the Dutch economy was paralyzed.

The first person to record the tulip bubble in history was Mackey. In an article published in 1852, he studied this case that occurred two hundred years ago. Unfortunately, his article is only 7 pages long. Not only does it provide incomplete data, it also fails to indicate the source of the data cited. After him, Beckmann summarized the relevant data from 1637 to 1643, and Muning discussed the economic data from 1672 to 1696. After 1950, due to the need to study the price changes of multiple dynamic and unstable assets, people once again noticed the very typical bubble economy phenomenon that occurred in the Netherlands. The tulip bubble became the earliest example of a bubble economy recorded in the literature.