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Bulb Bubble Trouble

That Dutch tulip bubble wasn't so crazy after all.

By |Posted Friday, July 16, 2004, at 5:05 PM

(Continued from Page 1)

So, the swift rise in prices for contracts on tulip bulbs in late 1636 and early 1637 was less a speculative frenzy than a market rationally responding to rule changes.

If they're correct—and it'll take someone with far more economic and data-crunching expertise than Moneybox to ratify or debunk their argument—then business writers will have to delete Tulipmania from their handy-pack of bubble analogies.

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Daniel Gross is the Moneybox columnist for Slate and the business columnist for Newsweek. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com and follow him on Twitter. His latest book, Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, has just been published in paperback.

Photograph of tulip © Royalty-Free/Corbis.