The pattern that keeps repeating with new instruments.
11 topics · 12 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
Charles Mackay · 1841
The founding popular account of speculative mania, covering tulips and the South Sea and Mississippi schemes — hugely influential and substantially…
+1 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Famous First Bubbles
Peter M. Garber · 1990
Reassesses tulip mania and the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles against surviving price and contract data, arguing the episodes were far less…
+2 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Stock Exchange Practices: Report of the Committee on Banking and Currency Pursuant to S.Res. 84
United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency · 1934
The official Senate investigation into pre-Crash Wall Street practices documents pervasive market manipulation, insider self-dealing at major banks…
+6 more at this level
12 works
Charles Mackay
The founding popular account of speculative mania, covering tulips and the South Sea and Mississippi schemes — hugely influential and substantially unreliable, since later archival work found the tulip episode far smaller and narrower than Mackay describes.
about 19 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Edwin Lefèvre
A fictionalised account of trader Jesse Livermore arguing that reading the tape and the patience to sit through a correct position matter more than any specific system, and that the same emotional mistakes ruin traders across every era.
about 7.5 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Peter M. Garber
Reassesses tulip mania and the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles against surviving price and contract data, arguing the episodes were far less irrational than the popular legend built on Mackay's account suggests.
Steve H. Hanke & Nicolas Krus
Compiles a systematic table of every episode in recorded history meeting a strict statistical definition of hyperinflation, showing the phenomenon is overwhelmingly the product of war, political collapse or regime transition.
Robert J. Shiller
Argues that speculative bubbles in stocks and homes are driven by social contagion of stories and imperfect rationality rather than by rational responses to fundamentals, and traces the recurring anatomy of these episodes across markets and eras.
link checked 17 Sept 2026United States Senate Committee on Banking and Currency
The official Senate investigation into pre-Crash Wall Street practices documents pervasive market manipulation, insider self-dealing at major banks and conflicted underwriting, and became the evidentiary basis for the Securities Act and Glass-Steagall.
Barry Eichengreen & Richard Portes
Compares sovereign debt defaults of the 1930s with the 1980s debt crisis and argues the earlier episode was resolved faster because bondholders, unlike 1980s bank creditors, had no ability to cut off future lending as leverage.
Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms
The official US investigation into the October 1987 crash concludes that portfolio insurance selling and index arbitrage between stock and futures markets, not any single trigger, mechanically amplified a moderate decline into a one-day collapse.
President's Working Group on Financial Markets
The official US government post-mortem on the 1998 near-collapse of Long-Term Capital Management concludes excessive leverage and thin, opaque disclosure let a single highly leveraged fund threaten systemic stability.
Eli Ofek & Matthew Richardson
Documents that internet stock valuations during the bubble were disconnected from fundamentals and were sustained partly by short-sale constraints and lock-up expirations that kept pessimists from correcting prices.
Peter Temin & Hans-Joachim Voth
Using the trading records of a well-informed banker who kept buying after recognising the bubble, argues sophisticated investors can rationally ride a bubble they know is mispriced rather than the market simply behaving irrationally.
Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission
The official US inquiry concludes the 2008 crisis was avoidable, the product of failures in regulation, corporate governance and risk management rather than an unforeseeable natural disaster.
link checked 17 Sept 2026