Tulip crisis causes. Tulip-financial crisis. this "new market price" is given by the market

The tulip became the subject of a simply grandiose speculation which, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, ruined one of the most economically developed countries that time - Holland. It was a real century. The tulip was brought from the East and had a peculiarity - after a few years, the color of the flowers changed, moreover, by chance. The owner of a single tulip bulb could become the owner of a completely new and unique variety, which is several times higher on the market than ordinary bulbs. In 1612, a catalog was published in Amsterdam, which included more than a hundred varieties of tulips. It was a full-fledged symbol of prosperity, which was of interest to many royal courts. Tulips have skyrocketed in price. So, in 1623, a tulip bulb cost already a thousand florins, and in 1634-1636 it cost already 4,600 florins. For comparison, a pig could be bought for thirty florins, and a cow for a hundred. Great scams could be safely started from this very case. In addition, the boom of tulips fell on the cholera epidemic in 1633-1635. In the Netherlands, there was a very high mortality rate, there were not enough workers, wages were growing. Ordinary Dutch got free ones by putting them in with tulips. The scam of the century developed naturally. Since these were seasonal plants, before the boom, trade in them was limited to the period from May to October. But there was a huge demand for these flowers all year round, so at the end of 1636 tulips became paper. They took the form of futures contracts. It began, one bought tulips from another, selling them to a third, while no one had the bulbs themselves. Thus, as many tulips came into circulation as it was impossible to grow in all of Holland. Prices in this market began to jump up and down at a tremendous rate, much faster than real demand went up or down. Only its experts could figure out all the tricks of this market. It was with their filing at the beginning of 1637 that the purchases of tulips decreased significantly. Everyone rushed to sell flowers, their prices fell very much. That's all, both poor and rich citizens. Then I correctly understood that it was impossible to blame anyone in particular for this madness, because everyone was to blame. Throughout the country there were special commissions that dealt with disputes over tulips. In the end, it was decided that everyone would receive five florins for every hundred that was due under the contracts. The great tulip scam was one of the most notable cases, without parallel. Many large farms were sold at auctions. Many poor people became even more impoverished. Holland suffered for a very long time from the effects of the fever on tulips.

Many mistakenly believe that tulips first appeared in Holland. Actually, it is not. The homeland of these flowers is the western part of the Mediterranean and part of Central Asia (Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkey). Some types of tulips grew wild in North Africa, Southern Europe and Japan.

This flower came to Europe in 1554. In Augsburg (Germany), the ambassador to the Turkish court, Busbeck, sent bulbs. He saw a beautiful flower during one of his trips around the country.

There is an interesting theory regarding the origin of the name of the flower. In 1562, the first large shipment of Turkish tulips reached Antwerp, which at the time was part of Dutch territory. Soon the supply of bulbs was put on stream. Gardeners from Europe saw similarities between the shape of the flower and the Turkish headdress. They started calling the flower "Tulipan", from "tuilbend", the Turkish word for turban. So the name of this beautiful flower appeared.

Gradually, the gardens of the nobility began to be increasingly decorated with tulips. Flowers became fashionable and tulip mania began all over Europe. The famous scientist Clusius made a lot of efforts to ensure that the flowers spread throughout Europe. He sent bulbs to numerous friends from his native Vienna in England and the Netherlands. The scientist began to collect all varieties of tulips known at that time. This hobby quickly gained popularity. Wealthy collectors ordered rare varieties of flowers from Turkey and bred them in Europe.

Around that period, the custom of assigning to new varieties the names of crowned and noble persons, and the names of cities, comes into fashion. This was due to the fact that among the admirers of tulips were Cardinal Richelieu, Voltaire, the Austrian Emperor Franz II and especially the French King Louis XVIII. In Versailles, they even organized holidays dedicated to tulips.

And yet, Holland surpassed France in its fascination with tulips. In the country, the passion for these flowers reached its climax when the bulbs began to be traded on the stock exchange ...

Tulips literally drove the Dutch crazy. Small but very rich country obsessed with tulip bulbs. Wealthy merchants did not want to give in to the nobles and decorated the flower beds in their gardens with royal scope. Tulips served as the main decoration.

Breeders constantly brought out new varieties of tulips. An interesting feature of this flower is its ability to mutate quickly. The flower may change greatly over two or three generations, so that the relationship between specimens and their parents may be barely recognizable.

At first, the demand for flowers increased, but prices nevertheless remained within reasonable limits. The turning point was 1630, when the cultivation of tulips reached enormous proportions. The bulb trade has grown into a stable and profitable business. It turned out that the climate and soil in Holland are ideal for growing tulips. Seasoned merchants began to buy even those bulbs that were grown in the gardens of monasteries in Belgium, which bordered on Holland. The centers of "tulip mania" were the cities of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Alkmaar, Leiden, Vianen, Enkhuizen, Haarlem, Rotterdam, Horn and Medenblick.

If just a few years ago, flower growers sold bulbs at an affordable price, then from 1634 prices began to artificially inflate. Bulbs begin to sell with the help of pharmaceutical scales. At this time, there is already an exchange and shares. So the methods of stock speculation quickly began to be applied to the sale of bulbs. The rate of tulips was so high that an entire industry worked for flowers.

There were special rooms in which auctions were held. Lawyers specializing in the execution of transactions for the purchase / sale of tulips appeared. For one tulip bulb, you can bargain for 2,500 guilders. For this money, one could buy two carts of wheat, four carts of hay, four bulls, the same number of pigs, twelve sheep, four barrels of beer, two barrels of butter, 500 kilograms of cheese, a bed, a suit and a silver goblet. In one of the Dutch cities, the total turnover of the tulip trade reached 10 million guilders. All the movables and real estate of the East India Company, the most powerful colonial monopoly of that time, were valued at the same amount on the stock exchange.

A turbulent period in Dutch history when the demand for bulbs began to outstrip supply and the commodity reached an unbelievable price.

One of the foreigners intrigued by tulips was Ohir Gilen de Bouzbek, the Austrian ambassador to Turkey. (1555-1562). He brought some bulbs from Constantinople to Vienna, where they were planted in the gardens of Ferdinand I, the Habsburg emperor. There the tulips blossomed under the expert supervision of Charles de Lecluse, a French botanist better known by his Latin name Carl Clusius.

Soon the fame of Clusius attracted the attention of the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and he was persuaded to become curator of the university botanical garden. In October 1593, with " a secret stockpile of tulip bulbs”, Clusius came to Leiden. A few months later, in the spring of 1594, the new garden of Clusius was the site of the very first tulip to bloom in the Netherlands.

Rise of the tulip trade

In 1625, one bulb of a rare variety of tulip could already cost 2,000 florins. (florin - a gold coin weighing about 3.5 grams). Their trading was organized on the exchanges of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Haarlem and Leiden.

By 1635 the price had reached 5,500 florins. By the beginning of 1637, the average price of tulips had risen 25 times.

● According to art historian Oliver Impey, it was cheaper to buy a painting of a tulip by Jan D. de Heem (the great Dutch still life painter of the 17th century) than a rare tulip bulb.

One onion was given as a dowry to the bride, three cost the same as good house, and just one bulb of the Tulip Brasserie variety was given for a prosperous brewery. Bulb sellers made huge profits. All conversations and transactions revolved around a single subject - onions.

The ever-increasing prices encouraged many families from the middle and poor strata of society to play on the exchange for the sale of tulips. Houses, fortunes, and businesses were mortgaged to buy bulbs and resell them at a higher price. Sales and resales were made many times, while the bulbs were not even taken out of the ground. States doubled in moments. The poor became rich, the rich became super-rich. Bulb trading on the stock exchange has become an uncontrolled market.

For transactions, futures contracts were often used. (buyers paid money for the supply of bulbs in the future), which received the figurative name "wind trade".

● According to Bernstein, options were also used for transactions (the buyer was given the right to buy or sell the bulbs at a predetermined price in the future). It was the use of options that was one of the reasons for the formation of a "soap bubble" and its decline. Options seem to have given many newcomers the opportunity to enter a trade that was previously closed to them.

● According to Charles McKay, at one point 12 acres of land were offered for the Semper Augustus tulip.

The collapse in prices for tulips

In February 1637, the number of sellers exceeded the number of buyers and there was an unexpected drop in prices - no more than 300 florins were given for the most expensive bulbs. started; in just one night, thousands of Dutch were ruined. By the end of the year, prices fell by an average of 100 times. It was the collapse of an entire branch of commerce. McKay argued that after the end of the tulip mania, the Dutch economy was in crisis, which is disputed by some modern scholars. Tulip mania also affected other European countries, but not to the same extent as Holland. For example, in 1800, a tulip bulb in England cost 15 guineas - a fairly substantial amount for those times.

The passion for tulips survived the effects of tulip mania and the tulip bulb industry flourished again. Indeed, by the end of the 18th century, Dutch tulips had become so famous that the Turkish Sultan Ahmed III imported thousands of tulips from Holland. So after a long journey, the Dutch descendant of Turkish tulips returned to their "roots".
Tulip mania is still insufficiently studied and has not been the subject of careful scientific analysis. For the first time, the phenomenon of tulip mania became widely known in 1841 after the publication of the book "The Most Common Misconceptions and Madness of the Crowd" written by the English journalist Charles Mackay, and the 1850 novel The Black Tulip by Alexandre Dumas.

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Scene: Holland.

Time of action: XVII century.

Corpus delicti: exchange trading in tulip "futures".

Scale: National.

Characters: almost the entire population of the country.

Type: B2B, P2P (business to business, people to people)

Tulip fever in Holland in the 17th century can be considered a scam in the sense that the word was put into the century before last, that is, a lucrative enterprise. But when the thirst for profit covers literally the entire population of the country, when one product becomes a means of profit, and the mechanisms for making transactions are not protected in any way, sooner or later everyone ends up losing.

Many economists believe that the reason financial crises- separation of the sphere of circulation (money) from the sphere of production (goods) due to globalization, growth and complication of world financial flows and the emergence of new banking technologies. For the first time, the threat of such a “separation from the people and fall” arose as early as the beginning of the 17th century “in one single country” - Holland, which at that time was one of the most economically developed.

The financial disaster was the result of the rush demand for tulips and the emergence of "futures" trading. Considering that contract insurance mechanisms were developed only centuries later, it is not surprising that almost the entire population of the country suffered from this "paper trade".

Why was the tulip the subject of national speculation, and not, say, emeralds or overseas spices and other colonial goods, to which the country of seafarers had almost exclusive access? Perhaps the fact is that at the beginning of the 17th century, a bouquet of tulips in a Dutchman's living room meant about the same thing as his own yacht or Rolls-Royce today. The tulip was a status symbol. He testified to belonging to the upper strata of society. It is not surprising that when a tulip bulb was affordable for the average Dutchman, a fever swept the country. Everyone wanted to snatch their piece and join the riches of the tulip market.

But there was another reason why it was the tulip that became the subject of grandiose speculation that ruined one of the most economically developed countries in Europe. Like most other ornamental plants, the tulip came to Europe from the Middle East. It was brought from Turkey in the middle of the 16th century. But the tulip had one interesting feature. Beautiful flowers of a single color grew from the bulbs, but after a few years it suddenly changed: stripes of various shades appeared on the petals. It is now known that this is the result of a viral disease of tulips. But then it seemed like a miracle. The Dutch jeweler, in order to get rich, had to first pay a lot of money for a diamond, then work for a long time to cut it, and then sell the stone at a profit. The owner of a single tulip bulb could instantly become the owner of a new, unique variety that could be sold at the tulip market several times more expensive.

The tulip was good because its striped varieties ideally suited the needs of the most expensive segment of the market - such flowers were rare and sold at a very high price, while the bulk of cheap yellow, pink and red tulips satisfied the needs of middle-class buyers.

In 1612, the Florilegium catalog with drawings of 100 varieties of tulips was published in Amsterdam. Many European royal courts became interested in the new symbol of prosperity. Tulips jumped in price. In 1623, a bulb of the rare Semper Augustus variety, which was in great demand, cost 1,000 florins, and at the height of the tulip boom in 1634–1636, up to 4,600 florins were paid for it. For comparison: a pig cost 30 florins, a cow - about 100.

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The third reason for the tulip boom was the plague of 1633-1635. Due to the high mortality, there was a shortage of workers and, accordingly, wages increased. The simple Dutch had money, and, looking at the tulip madness of the rich, they began to invest in their own tulip business.

Finally, tulips are seasonal plants. Before the tulip boom, they were traded from May (when the flower bulbs were dug up) to October (when they were planted and the tulip bloomed the following spring). But since demand catastrophically exceeded supply, seedling sales began in the dead winter season for tulip dealers. Of course, there was a risk for the buyer, but the seedlings cost less. Taking a risk and buying future tulips in November or December, in the spring it was possible to sell them for an order of magnitude or even several orders of magnitude more expensive. And from here it is only one step to "futures" transactions, and this step was immediately taken. At the end of 1635, tulips became "paper": a large share of their "harvest" in 1636 was sold under "futures" contracts.

Regular tulip auctions were held on stock exchange Amsterdam. And in the provinces - in Rotterdam, Haarlem, Leiden, Alkmaar and Horn - improvised tulip exchanges - colleges were created in taverns. They were engaged in, in fact, the same as on the main Amsterdam stock exchange - speculation in "paper" tulips. A special ritual of securities trading was even developed. For example, a potential buyer was forbidden to name his price, he could only hint that he would not mind buying this contract. After that, one of the sellers got up from the table and the two of them retired to the back room of the tavern. If they did not agree, then upon returning to the common room they paid a small amount to everyone else as compensation for the disruption possible deal. But the auction did not stop, and the new couple retired to a separate room. And the compensation was immediately spent on drinks for all the respectable brokers, so the trades must have been fun. If the deal was concluded, then upon returning from the office, the seller and the buyer put up a magarych for everyone present and, as usual, splashed beer and vodka on everyone.

In 1636, tulips became the subject of a great stock market game. Speculators have appeared who are not afraid to buy up "paper" flowers during the summer in order to sell them even more expensive next spring before the start of the season. A contemporary described the scenario of such transactions as follows: “A nobleman buys tulips from a chimney sweep for 2,000 florins and immediately sells them to a peasant, while neither a nobleman, nor a chimney sweep, nor a peasant has tulip bulbs and does not seek to have them. This is how more tulips are bought and sold than the land of Holland can grow.

Prices have skyrocketed. Tulip bulbs Admiral de Maan, which cost 15 florins apiece, were sold two years later for 175 florins. The price of the Centen variety jumped from 40 florins to 350 florins, for one Admiral Liefkin bulb they paid 4400 florins. The documented record was a deal of 100,000 florins for 40 tulip bulbs.

To attract poor people, sellers began to take small advances in cash, and the property of the buyer went as collateral. For example, the cost of a bulb of a Viceroy tulip was "2 loads (2.25 cubic meters) of wheat, 4 loads of rye, 4 fat cows, 8 fat pigs, 12 fat sheep, 2 furs of wine, 4 barrels of beer, 2 barrels of butter, 1000 pounds of cheese, a bed, a wardrobe with clothes and a silver goblet ”- all goodness for 2500 florins. The artist Jan van Goyen paid the burgomaster of The Hague an advance of 1,900 florins for ten bulbs, offered a painting by Solomon van Ruysdael as a pledge of the rest of the amount, and also undertook to paint his own.

Tulip fever has given rise to legends. One of them is about how a port tramp, seeing a ship entering the harbor, rushed to the office of its owner. The merchant, delighted with the news of the return of the long-awaited ship, chose the fattest herring from the barrel and rewarded the beggar with it. And he, seeing on the desk an onion that looked like peeled onions, decided that herring was good, but herring with onions was even better, put the onion in his pocket and departed in an unknown direction. A few minutes later, the merchant missed the tulip bulb Semper Augustus ("Eternal August"), for which he paid 3,000 florins. When the tramp was found, he was already finishing his herring with "onions". The poor man went to jail for theft private property in especially large sizes.

And here is another legend. Haarlem tulip merchants heard about a Hague shoemaker who allegedly managed to breed a black tulip. A deputation from Haarlem visited the shoemaker and bought all the bulbs from him for 1,500 florins. After that, right before the eyes of an amateur tulip grower, the Harlem people rushed to furiously trample the bulbs and calmed down, only turning them into porridge. They were afraid that an unprecedented black tulip would undermine their well-established business. The shoemaker could not bear the abuse of flowers, fell ill and died.

The first bell rang at the end of 1636, when tulip growers and city magistrates finally noticed that the trade was mainly in "paper" tulips. With a sharp increase in the number of players on the tulip exchange, prices began to jump in both directions faster than real demand went down or up. Only experts could understand the intricacies of the market. They advised at the beginning of 1637 to reduce purchases. On February 2, the purchases actually stopped, everyone was selling. Prices began to fall catastrophically. Both the poor and the rich were ruined.

The main dealers made a desperate attempt to salvage the situation by organizing mock auctions. Buyers began to break contracts for the flowers of the summer season of 1637, and on February 24 the main tulip growers gathered in Amsterdam for an emergency meeting. They developed the following scenario for overcoming the crisis. Contracts concluded before November 1636 were proposed to be considered valid, and buyers could terminate subsequent transactions in unilaterally by paying 10% compensation. However Supreme Court The Netherlands, which considered tulip growers to be the main culprits in the mass ruin of Dutch citizens, vetoed this decision and proposed its own version. Sellers, desperate to get money from buyers, were given the right to sell the goods to a third party for any price, and then demand the difference from the one with whom the original agreement was concluded. But no one else wanted to buy.

The government realized that no specific category of citizens could be blamed for the tulip madness. Everyone was to blame. Special commissions worked throughout the country to resolve disputes over tulip deals. As a result, most of the sellers agreed to receive 5 florins out of every 100 that were due to them under the contracts.

The three-year stagnation in other, "non-tulip" areas of the Dutch economy cost the country dearly. Some later even considered that it was during the period of tulip madness that the main competitor - England - managed to intercept many of the original Dutch markets abroad. Like it or not, the shock that Holland experienced in the 17th century is quite comparable to the default of 1998. However, the end of this story is still good: the mechanisms of futures trading work properly all over the world, and Holland is still considered the country of tulips, and the scale of the Dutch flower business can only be envied.

Source book “The world's biggest scams. The Art of Deception and Deception as Art"

tulip mania- this is a classic example of a stock market bubble and the crash that followed it, with all the ensuing consequences. It cannot be said that the tulip crisis was the first crisis in history. There were crises in ancient civilizations, but the tulip crisis in Holland was generated by speculation, and not by a series of crop failures, for example. This is the history of tulip mania.

Tulips were brought to Holland from Turkey in the first half of the 17th century. The first tulip flowers were not particularly beautiful, however, experiments on breeding tulips yielded results and the number of varieties increased dramatically. Large areas were sown with tulips, their popularity grew. The prices for tulips also rose. For a couple of bulbs of some varieties, the inhabitants of Holland were ready to give away fortunes.

Gradually more and more people began to get involved in the tulip trade. The Dutch sold property cheaply and bought expensive tulip bulbs. However, at that time the concepts of "expensive" and "cheap" were different. Individual speculators made a fortune in a couple of transactions with tulips. Seeing this, a huge number of people began to buy and sell tulips.
Physically, there were not enough tulips and people started trading futures and options for future tulip bulbs. That is, not yet grown tulips were bought and sold by people. As shortages increased, prices skyrocketed.

The crash happened very quickly. In February 1637, prices began to fall sharply. People began to get rid of the bulbs, and by the end of 1637 a tulip bulb could be bought for less than one percent of its former price.

The consequences were sad - almost everyone who participated in the speculation lost, if not all, then almost all. The only one positive moment in this story, it is that Holland now remains the main producer of tulips (probably it was a pity to throw away depreciated bulbs, they decided to breed and sell to others).

What conclusion can be drawn from this story? Let's look at the US mortgage crisis in 2007. common features between real estate and history with tulips (which is almost 400 years old!) more than it might seem at first glance. So, theses:

1. Tulips and American houses are very pretty things to the eye, and both were desired, if not by the whole population, at least by the greater part of it;
2. Real estate and tulip prices began to rise gradually, and then a real boom began, which was fueled by various "success stories";
3. Demand was in both cases predominantly speculative, i.e. few people were going to own the asset, be it a bulb or a house;
4. The most important point is that the real product has ceased to be an object of speculation. The so-called "securitization" took place, i. obligations to deliver tulips and pay a mortgage for a house were presented in the form of securities (from English security - a security). These ones securities and became the subject of speculation and, as a result, collapse. Important point- almost no one could have guessed that the price of the underlying asset, i.e. tulips and real estate may someday go down. This belief has turned "highly reliable" assets into "toxic" ones.
5. And one more feature - the whole economy and foreign "investors" suffered. Only in the case of real estate has globalization played a role, so the consequences current crisis heavier than 400 years ago.

Conclusion: what is happening to the world economy now is the consequences of another tulip mania, only its scale is larger.