Blowing blowing gone
13 September 2012
History is bursting with economic bubbles, from tulip mania in the seventeenth century to the ‘dotbomb’ today, but why haven’t we learned our lesson?
Bubbles feature conspicuously in business history. The 1844 Select Committee on Joint Stock Companies report categorised the main types of bubble company as those that are "so ill constituted as to render it probable that… miscarriages or failures… will attend them" and those "fraudulent in their objective".
However, as the philosopher Kant observed, the only...