Tulip Mania and Speculative Bubbles (the undeserving tulip)

Most students of economics know that capitalism was born in the Netherlands during the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Holland, in fact, birthed the world's first commodity futures market, and logically, the world's first speculative bubble. The commodity that caused a financial frenzy wasn't gold, silver, tobacco or silk.

It was the tulip.

Tulips were highly valued and sought after as symbols of affluence. Because their bulbs reproduced cloned buds and could be dug up and transported at the end of their season, their "futures" could be traded and speculated upon. In 1636, a highly prized variety of tulip was discovered and cultivated (it was infected with a mosaic virus that gave the flower brilliant striations of color). During a lull in the 30 Years War, the French entered the tulip market, and the bidding on the mosaic-infected varieties took off. The price of the bulbs at its height was 150 times the average yearly earnings for a skilled craftsman or guild member (they formed the majority of speculators). The frenzy became known as the Tulip Mania of 1636, and the flower has become a symbol of rampant speculative fever ever since.

In our era, the symbol should no longer be the undeserving tulip. It rightfully should be the Bush.

Flowers for your broker...

Yesterday we ran a

"Wall Street Bail-out Special."
Free* flowers.

(*Your children will pay for them later...)


Today's sale:

Hardy* Mums: $7.99 (or 2.2 Euros)
* "fundamentally strong..."

How do main street businesses respond to Wall Street crises? On Monday morning, the streets of suburban Teaneck were like a ghost town. I imagined everyone at home, hiding under their blankets, wondering if the news anchors were going to go on the air and just announce that The Great Depression II has now begun. It won't happen like that, of course - anymore than the Crash of '29 was signalled by brokers leaping from office building windows.

This is Reaganomics coming home to roost. And what a dirty, pestilential flock of birds it is.

How do like deregulation now? It's a technicolor example of privatized profit and socialized debt. Keep government out of the affairs of business - until, of course, it comes time to pull their miserable, bloated selves out of the gutter. But this is not just "corporate greed" or something endemic only to Wall Street. It's structural. It is the logic of capitalism itself. Which is why the answers must also be structural, and they must adhere to an entirely different kind of logic: people (including future generations of people) before profits. Just a thought.