Legends of the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles have endured today as warnings against the fatality of irrational exuberance in financial markets. However, as details of these first financial crises are somewhat exaggerated, it has proven difficult for historians to separate fact from myth. The question remains as to whether investors behaved irrationally or sensibly in response to these events in the early eighteenth century.
It appears that a lack of investor sophistication and the adverse effects of herding are partly to blame for the unsustainable prices increases. Some argue that ‘irrational exuberance is the psychological basis of a speculative bubble’. However, many historians have rejected that investors acted in a fit of ‘irrational exuberance’, instead determining that they responded sensibly to the information available to them. It seems that a combination of these two theories would best explain the initial extraordinary popularity of these two schemes
It is important, before examining the events of the Mississippi and South Sea Bubbles, to approach the various definitions of the word ‘bubble’. According to the Dictionary of Political Economy (1926), the early modern definition of a bubble is as follows, ‘any unsound undertaking accompanied by a high degree of speculation’. This suggests that the investor basis his undertaking on an unwise or irrational assumption. However, Kindleberger appears to remove the presence of irrationality from the equation, defining a bubble as ‘an upward price movement over an extended range that then implodes’. It is therefore primarily unclear as to whether the very manifestation of a bubble presupposes the existence of investor irrationality.
Before categorising the victims ...
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...rst Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
• Hoppit, Julian, ‘The Myths of the South Sea Bubble’, Transaction of the Royal Historical Society, Sixth Series, Vol. 12 (2002), pp. 141-65.
• Kindleberger, Charles and Robert Z. Aliber, Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
• MacKay, Charles, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (London: Office of the National Illustrated Library, 1852).
• Marietta, Morgan, ‘The Historical Continuum of Financial Illusion’ The American Economist, Vol. 40, No. 1 (Spring, 1996), pp. 79-91.
• Shiller, Robert J., Irrational Exuberance, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005).
• Walsh, Patrick, ‘The South Sea Bubble: A Parable for our own Time’, History Ireland, Vol. 17, No. 2 (March-April 2009), pp. 6-7.
Not only were millions of Americans been put out of work due to these manager’s actions, the American financial markets themselves were pushed to the brink of collapse. Despite the fact that the global financial markets, in reality, are not perfectly efficient, there is a corrective mechanism built into the day-to-day trading in the market. When prices are driven down by large sells, either by large investors or a movement in a stock, there are usually new buyers for these stocks at the cheaper price. Managers of...
It is often said that perception outweighs reality and that is often the view of the stock market. News that a certain stock may be on the rise can set off a buying spree, while a tip that one may be on decline might entice people to sell. The fact that no one really knows what is going to happen one way or the other is inconsequential. John Kenneth Galbraith uses the concept of speculation as a major theme in his book The Great Crash 1929. Galbraith’s portrayal of the market before the crash focuses largely on massive speculation of overvalued stocks which were inevitably going to topple and take the wealth of the shareholders down with it. After all, the prices could not continue to go up forever. Widespread speculation was no doubt a major player in the crash, but many other factors were in play as well. While the speculation argument has some merit, the reasons for the collapse and its lasting effects had many moving parts that cannot be explained so simply.
It has been said that every good thing must arrive at an end. On account of the Roaring Twenties that end came suddenly and startlingly. It is simple for one to think back upon the monetary circumstance that prompt the accident and disparagement the specialists for not seeing the indications of a potential calamity. Be that as it may, it was not all that simple for them to see such an accident coming. The 1920 's were a blasting decade and stock costs appeared to be at an unfaltering move for an apparently interminable ascent. Numerous elements can be ascribed to the reason for the accident however nobody element can be singled out as the lone reason. The real reasons for the share trading system accident of 1929
During 1928, the stock market was common among any class of the roaring twenties. Ordinary people talked about, and many made millions off the stock market. People watched other people invest their money and gain more profit hence, increasing other’s trust in the stock market. Many people did not have money to pay the total prices of stocks; people bought stocks “on margin”, meaning that the buyer would put down some of his own money, but the rest the buyer would borrow from a broker. Thus, the buyer borrowed about 80-90 percent of the cost of the stock and only 10-20 percent of his money (“The Stock Market Crash of 1929”). This way of investing money was very risky. At times, brokers issued a “margin call.” In this case, the buyer had to pay back the money he borrowed earlier. Most ordinary people bought...
The Stock Market Crash marked a major turning point in the history of the United States. For decades the U.S. was the world’s leading superpower, but after the crash the country cascaded into the worlds most harsh depression. This crash was caused by a series of problems in the U.S. including, the over production of goods, unequal distribution of wealth and poor regulation of the stock market itself. Many can argue that the crash of 1929, strengthened the nation, allowing for policies such as roosevelt's first new deal, second new deal, the glass steagall banking act, and new regulations in the stock market, and for big business (Blumenthal, Karen). However, what can’t be argued is how the crash sparked a panic as companies, peoples, and the nation sank into the great depression.
Post the era of World War I, of all the countries it was only USA which was in win win situation. Both during and post war times, US economy has seen a boom in their income with massive trade between Europe and Germany. As a result, the 1920’s turned out to be a prosperous decade for Americans and this led to birth of mass investments in stock markets. With increased income after the war, a lot of investors purchased stocks on margins and with US Stock Exchange going manifold from 1921 to 1929, investors earned hefty returns during this time epriod which created a stock market bubble in USA. However, in order to stop increasing prices of Stock, the Federal Reserve raised the interest rate sof loanabel funds which depressed the interest sensitive spending in many industries and as a result a record fall in stocks of these companies were seen and ultimately the stock bubble was finally burst. The fall was so dramatic that stock prices were even below the margins which investors had deposited with their brokers. As a reuslt, not only investor but even the brokerage firms went insolvent. Withing 2 days of 15-16 th October, Dow Jones fell by 33% and the event was referred to Great Crash of 1929. Thus with investors going insolvent, a major shock was seen in American aggregate demand. Consumer Purchase of durable goods and business investment fell sharply after the stock market crash. As a result, businesses experienced stock piling of their inventories and real output fell rapidly in 1929 and throughout 1930 in United States.
Cabral, R. (2013). A perspective on the symptoms and causes of the financial crisis. Journal of Banking & Finance, 37, 103-117
] This catastrophic event is caused by the accumulation of a large scale of speculation by not only investors but also banks and institutions in the stock market. Though the unemployment rate was climbing during the 1920s and economy was not looking good, people on Wall Street were not affected by the depressing news. The optimism spread from Wall Street to small investors and they were investing with the money they don’t have, which is investing on margin as high as 90%. When the speculative bubble burst, people lost everything including houses and pensions. The main reason ...
The financial crisis occurred in 2008, where the world economy experienced the most dangerous crisis ever since the Great Depression of the 1930s. It started in 2007 when the home prices in the U.S. Dropped significantly, spreading very quickly, initially to the financial sector of the U.S. and subsequently to the financial markets in other countries.
The efficient market, as one of the pillars of neoclassical finance, asserts that financial markets are efficient on information. The efficient market hypothesis suggests that there is no trading system based on currently available information that could be expected to generate excess risk-adjusted returns consistently as this information is already reflected in current prices. However, EMH has been the most controversial subject of research in the fields of financial economics during the last 40 years. “Behavioural finance, however, is now seriously challenging this premise by arguing that people are clearly not rational” (Ross, (2002)). Behavioral finance uses facts from psychology and other human sciences in order to explain human investors’ behaviors.
Ferguson, Niall. The Ascent of Money: a Financial History of the World. 1st ed. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.
During the 1920s, approximately 20 million Americans took advantage of post-war prosperity by purchasing shares of stock in various securities exchanges. When the stock market crashed in 1929, the fortunes of many investors were lost. In addition, banks lost great sums of money in the Crash because they had invested heavily in the markets. When people feared their banks might not be able to pay back the money that depositors had in their accounts, a “run” on the banking system caused many bank failures. After the crash, public confidence in the market and the economy fell sharply. In response, Congress held hearings to identify the problems and look for solutions; the answer was found in the new SEC. The Commission was established in 1934 to enforce new securities laws that were passed with the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. The two new laws stated that “Companies publicly offering securities must tell the public the truth about their businesses, the securities they are selling and the risks involved in the investing.” Secondly, “People who sell and trade securities must treat investors fairly and honestly, putting investors’ interests first.”2
Howells, Peter., Bain, Keith 2000, Financial Markets and Institutions, 3rd edn, Henry King Ltd., Great Britain.
As the market was crowded with inexperienced but feverishly eager investors who lacked capital reserves, the falling prices produced a shock effect...
One reason is that many successful investment ventures itself is the outcome of these ‘irrationality’. Risk-taking, which is inevitable in investment, may contribute to the investors’ better performance than others, while with the assistance of proper training, assessment accuracy can be increased(Palich and Ray Bagby, 1995). Also, if without precedent, most of the newly-invented value-maximising approaches or strategy of investment ought to be considered as crude and unthoughtful, but in reality, they are regarded as innovation(Busenitz and Barney, 1997). Furthermore, there are evidence shows that instead of being the hindrance of correct investment decision-making, those biases and heuristics are backed up by probabilistic information. Accurate statistical probability can be evaluated by our inductive reasoning mechanism with a relatively high possibility(Cosmides and Tooby,