Monday, September 9, 2013

Tulipomania


From the Crisis Chronicles at Liberty Street Economics:

By the 1630s, the market for tulips began to grow as florists started buying and selling tulip bulbs still in the ground using promissory notes. The notes provided welcome credit and liquidity to help finance planting and limited credit risk to a known borrower with the borrower’s bulbs as collateral. However, the notes created a limited opportunity to inspect bulbs or to see them flower, provided no guarantee of quality, nor proof that the bulbs actually belonged to the seller, or even existed.

The post also considers Lessons for Regulators.

// Related post: 300 Years of Financial Crises

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