The Granddaddy of All Bubbles

For those still recovering from the financial meltdown of 2008, it may be small consolation to know that they have many generations of predecessors.  Investors seem never to learn the lessons of financial bubbles and their inevitable consequences.  These lessons could be discerned almost three centuries ago, in 1720, in London’s notorious clamor for shares of the South Sea Company.  Paul Strathern here relates the story of the South Sea Bubble, the first great financial hysteria, whose characteristics appear all too familiar today.