Extraordinary Popular Delusions

<div><div>This classic survey of crowd psychology offers an illuminating and entertaining look at three grand-scale swindles. Originally published in England in 1841, its remarkable tales of human folly reveal that the hysteria of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the junk-bonds frenzy of the 1980s were far from uniquely twentieth-century phenomena.<br>The first of the financial scandals discussed, "The Mississippi Scheme," concerns a disastrous eighteenth-century plan for the commercial exploitation of the Mississippi valley, where investors were lured by Louisiana's repute as a region of gold and silver mountains. During the same era, thousands of English investors were ruined by "The South-Sea Bubble," a stock exchange based on British trade with the islands of the South Seas and South America. The third episode involves Holland's seventeenth-century "Tulipomania," when people went into debt collecting tulip bulbs &#8212; until a sudden depreciation in the bulbs' value rendered them worthless (except as flowers).<br>Fired by greed and fed by naivet&#233;, &#160;these historic investment strategies gone awry retain an irrefutable relevance for modern times. <i>Extraordinary Popular Delusions</i> is essential and enthralling reading for investors as well as students of history, psychology, and human nature.</div></div>