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Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias

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Author Info
Peter M. Garber () (Brown University)

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Abstract

The jargon of economics and finance contains numerous colorful terms for market-asset prices at odds with any reasonable economic explanation. Examples include "bubble," "tulipmania," "chain letter," "Ponzi scheme," "panic," "crash," "herding," and "irrational exuberance." Although such a term suggests that an event is inexplicably crowd-driven, what it really means, claims Peter Garber, is that we have grasped a near-empty explanation rather than expend the effort to understand the event. In this book Garber offers market-fundamental explanations for the three most famous bubbles: the Dutch Tulipmania (1634-1637), the Mississippi Bubble (1719-1720), and the closely connected South Sea Bubble (1720). He focuses most closely on the Tulipmania because it is the event that most modern observers view as clearly crazy. Comparing the pattern of price declines for initially rare eighteenth-century bulbs to that of seventeenth-century bulbs, he concludes that the extremely high prices for rare bulbs and their rapid decline reflects normal pricing behavior. In the cases of the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles, he describes the asset markets and financial manipulations involved in these episodes and casts them as market fundamentals.

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Publisher Info
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This book is provided by The MIT Press in its series MIT Press Books with number 0262571536 and published in 2001.

Volume: 1
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0-262-57153-6
Handle: RePEc:mtp:titles:0262571536

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Web page: http://mitpress.mit.edu

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Related research
Keywords: bubbles; Dutch Tulipmania; market-asset prices;

Find related papers by JEL classification:
G12 - Financial Economics - - General Financial Markets - - - Asset Pricing
E32 - Macroeconomics and Monetary Economics - - Prices, Business Fluctuations, and Cycles - - - Business Fluctuations; Cycles
N20 - Economic History - - Financial Markets and Institutions - - - General, International, or Comparative

Cited by:
(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Lubos Pastor & Pietro Veronesi, 2004. "Was There a Nasdaq Bubble in the Late 1990s?," NBER Working Papers 10581, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
    Other versions:
  2. M. Fase, 2008. "Book Review," De Economist, Springer, vol. 156(1), pages 103-105, March. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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