Edward Chancellor: Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, Kartoniert / Broschiert

Beschreibung

Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed--and not changed--over the last five hundred years? Edward Chancellor examines the nature of speculation--from medieval Europe to the Tulip mania of the 1630s to today's Internet stock craze. A contributing writer to The Financial Times and The Economist , looks at both the psychological and economic forces that drive people to "bet" their money in markets; how markets are made, unmade, and manipulated; and who wins when speculation runs rampant. Drawing colorfully on the words of such speculators as Sir Isaac Newton, Daniel Defoe, Ivan Boesky , and Hillary Rodham Clinton , Devil Take the Hindmost is part history, part social science, and purely illuminating: an erudite and hugely entertaining book that is more timely today than ever before.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface: Devil Take the Hindmost
1. "This Bubble World": The Origins of Financial Speculation
2. Stockjobbing in 'Change Alley: The Projecting Age of the 1690s
3. "The Never-to-Be-Forgot or Forgiven South-Sea Scheme"
4. Fool's Gold: The Emerging Markets of the 1820s
5. "A Ready Communication": The Railway Mania of 1845
6. "Befooled, Bewitched and Bedeviled": Speculation in the Gilded Age
7. The End of a New Era: The Crash of 1929 and Its Aftermath
8. Cowboy Capitalism: From Bretton Woods to Michael Milken
9. Kamikaze Capitalism: The Japanese Bubble Economy of the 1980s
Epilogue: The Case of the Rogue Economists
Notes
For Further Reference
Acknowledgments
Index

Klappentext

A lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day.

Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed-and not changed-over the last five hundred years?

In Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to "stockjobbing" in London's Exchange Alley, to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people."

Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the "assurance of female chastity"; credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.