Two lasts of wheat, four lasts of rye, four fat oxen, eight fat swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four tuns of beer, two tons of butter, one thousand lbs. of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes, a silver drinking cup. According to Charles Mackay’s book “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” this was the price tag for a single tulip bulb root during the Dutch Tulip bubble of the early 1600s.
Let it sink in...
One thousand pounds of cheese? Two tons of butter? I asked ChatGPT how many sticks of standard grocery store butter that would be. It’s about 8,800..
.for one tulip bulb. While it’s easy to scoff or think of the 17th century Dutch as somewhat primitive, that was hardly the case.
They simply got caught up in a good ol’ fashioned investment mania. I can calculate the movement of the stars, but not the madness of men. So lamented Sir Isaac Newton, formulator of the laws of universal gravitation, co-developer of calculus, creator of the Newtonian reflecting telescope.
.. .
..and horrendous investor.
Newton was a speculator in the South Sea Company stock bubble during the period around 1711-1720. For all his brilliance, he couldn’t protect himself from losing the present-day equivalent of more than $4M on the trade. In short, Newton got caught up in the frenzy of excitement surrounding the much-hyped South Sea Company.
He rode the stock up to filthy-rich levels, but then didn’t sell when the stock began to turn south. Here.
