The Guys Who Give Tulips a Bad Name

Christian Day, a professor at Syracuse University law school…has written about bubbles and panics. He said that comparing Bitcoin to the tulip craze was unfair to tulips…. 

            – John Schwartz in The New York Times

Those of us who find cryptocurrency mania difficult to fathom can learn from Nellie Bowles' fascinating sketches of the young guys who are busy creating cryptocurrency investment opportunities in San Francisco.  (Not that 20-somethings appear young in that milieu. See Bowles' earlier magazine piece on the city's teenage techies.)

Worried that clients will lose their shirts on Bitcoin or alternative cryptocurrencies? Then suggest they buy a sweater for emergency use. Hodlmoon.com will provide one stitched with the logo of whatever cryptocoinage they're betting on.

If It Smells Like a Tulip . . .

This year…

The value of Bitcoin has increased by more than 600 percent.

One hundred hedge funds have been set up to invest exclusively in Bitcoin.

And as of the end of last month, nearly a third of Bill Miller's hedge fund was said to be invested in Bitcoin.

Nathaniel Popper of the Times provides a lucid introduction to this year's steaming hot investment.

“You could get a possible run on the bank if one large investor withdraws and that causes the price to tank," says one trader. But that appears to be a minority worry. Almost everybody frets about a possible collapse of stock prices. Almost nobody, aside from grumps like JPMorganChase's Jamie Dimon, seems to think that Bitcoin will wilt in the heat of irrational exuberance.

Was Tulip Mania Fake News?

For generations, economists and financial writers have illustrated the folly of investment bubbles by referencing the 17th-century  tulip mania. As colorfully described by Charles Mackay in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Amsterdam went nuts over "broken tulips," bidding astronomical prices for virus-inflected bulbs that produced exotic blooms.

But we may have to find another financial frenzy with which to scare investors. There was no tulip fever, Smithsonian asserts. Prices for "hot" bulbs did soar and eventually crash, but trading was largely limited to urban upward strivers, eager to obtain the exotic status symbol of the day. Mackay fell for tall tales told by Dutch moralists dramatizing the evils of trying to get rich quick.

For the moment, looks like we'll have to settle for the millennial dot-com bubble to illustrate the dangers of irrational investor exuberance. But have patience – bitcoin mania may have legs.

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Like to learn more? Peter M. Barber's Famous First Bubbles can be read online here. YouTube offers numerous treatments of tulip mania – this two-parter will tell you more than you may want to know.

A Canvas Craze?

Delaware Freeport

Art collectors are being replaced by investors. Where collectors might safeguard  prize works by placing them on long-term loan at a museum, tax-averse art investors hide away their masterpieces in free port warehouses. In Switzerland, perhaps. Or right here in the States, in Newark, Delaware.

Wonder what financial historians a century from now will say about our art craze. Will they be able to figure out why investors paid tens of millions of dollars, even hundreds of millions, for products that consisted of no more than a few hundred dollars worth of wood, canvas and pigment?


Maybe they'll call it just another Tulip Mania.

Tulips, Perpetually Positive Returns and Other Manias

From Wikimedia Commons comes this image of an allegorical painting of the Dutch tulip mania, c. 1640. Flora, goddess of flowers, rides on a wind-blown wagon with a two-faced woman, drunks and money-changers, followed by other low-lifes, all headed for ruin in the sea.


In a WSJ column, Why We Fall for Financial Scams, psychologist Stephen Greenspan cites "the tendency of humans to model their actions -- especially when dealing with matters they don't fully understand -- on the behavior of other humans." Greenspan touches upon a number of financial crazes through the ages, including an inheritance fraud from the 1920s involving the supposed will of Sir Francis Drake.

Professor Greenspan has written a book, Annals of Gullibility. More recently he inadvertently invested some of his life savings with, yes, Bernard Madoff!