April 2, 2025 • 12 mins
The world experienced its first economic bubble when the Dutch went bonkers for tulips in the 1630s.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for a Dave. And
this is short stuff about tulip mania.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
That's right. Tulip Mania was perhaps the first financial bubble
to happen and then burst. And we should probably talk
a little bit about what an economic bubble is, don't
you think.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, it's where the price of a good or an
asset or something like that. Let's just say item sure
goes sky high way way way beyond any reasonable value
that it should have, and it's because of exuberant trading.
And the more exuberant the trading is, the more people
get sucked in by it, and they want to make
some money too, so more people start investing, and the
(00:49):
prices keep going higher and higher and higher. That's the
first part of the bubble. There's another less happy side
of the bubble too.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's right, because as anyone who's ever been to a
bubble rave or a played bubbles with your kids or
just adult friends who enjoy bubbling, that bubble's going to burst.
They all will eventually, And that's what happens with an
economic bubble too. The price will drop usually pretty quickly,
and a lot of people start selling off very quickly,
(01:20):
and those who get out early enough can usually avoid it.
But every single time, someone is going to be left
holding that asset that is all of a sudden not
worth much of anything. And a lot of times the
people have invested their entire life savings in this stuff.
A lot of times they've bought this stuff on credit,
and all of a sudden, this thing isn't worth that
much money and they're in real, real financial trouble.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, it's a bad scene.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
And so, like you said, all the way back in
the seventeenth century, people consider the first economic bubble to
have surrounded tulips and tulip bulbs in Holland.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
That's right. And when you said tulip mania, that's really
what it was called. You weren't just being cheeky.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
No, that's what it's referred to. I'm sure among economists,
among historians, among the Dutch, among podcasters, it's called tulipmania.
That wasn't just me being funny.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
So a little bit about tulips native to places like
Kazakhstan and Eastern Europe and the Himalayas. They don't look
like the tulips in their original form that we think
of today, but they've been cultivated over the years and
you know, cross bread to where they look like they
look like tulips. Now, these these beautiful we have tulips
popping up here in Atlanta already this spring and they're lovely.
(02:39):
They're grown from bulbs and they're I don't know about
how easy or hard it is, but they, like I said,
are cross bread to create new and exciting varieties and colors.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Yeah. So tulips first arrived in Holland around sixteen hundred.
The Dutch East India Company was moving spices and exotic
goods from the East to Europe, Holland in particular, and
tulips arrived. And for the first couple decades they were
you know, if you were a plant enthusiast, you probably
(03:11):
had a tulip in your collection. If you were very,
very rich and just wanted to show off how cutting
edge you were, you might have some tulips in your garden.
But they weren't a big deal until sixteen thirty four.
And the reason they became a big deal almost overnight,
was because those same upper classes and nobility in Holland
(03:32):
decided that tulips were now a status symbol, and that
if you didn't have tulips growing in your garden and
you were a member of the aristocracy or nobility, you
were a total loser with a capital A.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
That's right. So in this case you had, economically speaking,
you had a big time demand all of a sudden.
But not only was it a big time demand, it
was a big time demand of people that had a
lot of money. So the price went through the roof
very quickly. A bulb, a single bulb, one tulip bulb,
(04:06):
would fetch two thousand florin, And just to put it
into perspective of what you could buy back then, for
two thousand florin, sixteen thousand pounds of cheese, two hundred
and fifty tons of beer, a couple of hundred sheep,
or maybe sixteen grown oxen. And they were paying prices
in today's dollars. Thank you Investipedia for doing this weird translation,
(04:29):
but in today's dollars for a single tulip bulb, they
were paying fifty grand, one hundred and fifty grand even
sometimes for the rarest varieties, up to a million dollars
for a single bulb.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, that fifty you do one hundred and fifty grand.
That was like day to day stuff, right, that's what
a single tulip bulb, single bulb. It was nuts. Even
at the time, there were people who were watching this
and they're like, this is crazy. They're tulips, for God's sake.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, They're riding out a giant check with a feathered
pen and they're just like, I can't believe I'm paying
this amount of money.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
For exactly I say, we take a break and come
back and talk more about tulip mania, Okay, Chuck. So
(05:35):
we were just talking about how crazy expensive a single
tulip bulb was in Holland in the sixteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Single tulip bulbs.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Right, So, some people among the wealthy would use like
significant portions of their fortune, of their wealth to buy
tulips and just grow them. They weren't reselling them, they
weren't doing anything. They were buying tulips and growing them.
They were spending half of their worth to buy tulips
just to show off. Right.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
At some point people started saying, like I think that
if I start buying tulips and then selling them for
a higher price, I could really make some money. And
as a matter of fact, I can start speculating where
I will go into futures contracts with people and say, hey,
I'll sell you X number of tulips in three weeks
for X number of dollars because I'm betting that the
(06:25):
price is going to go down, but you're betting that
the price is going to go up. Let's see who wins.
And speculation is one of the main drivers essentially of
an economic bubble. Like it's crazy that the single bulbs
were going for that. But once people started speculating and
creating like instruments and futures contracts based on that crazy
(06:47):
high price, that's when it really started to get troublesome.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, for sure, they were actually sold on the Dutch
stock Exchange, and these were, you know, some wealthy investors,
but everybody got in on the gang, like the gang
the game, just regular middle working class people, even like
people of the lower classes. They started cashing in everything
(07:12):
they could, selling their houses, in some cases, selling the
tools of their trade that they were previously making money
on to invest in these tulips. And you know what's
going to happen is that eventually is going to burst
and it did so less than two years after this
frenzied investment stuff started in sixteen thirty six.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah, the bubble bursts because some people, like we said
earlier that there were some people who are like, this
is crazy, and even some speculators and people who are
invested in tulips were like, this is not going to
last much longer. I'm going to get out. And as
more people started to decide to get out, you can
trigger a panic. And if you trigger a panic, all
(07:53):
of a sudden, the bubble bursts and the price just
drops precipitously. And that's what happened with the tulip mania bubble.
A bunch of people who had large stocks of tulip
bulbs when the price dropped almost overnight, were ruined financially.
They had, say, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
(08:13):
tulips that they'd paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for
that were now worth hundreds of dollars, and it was
a bad jam for anybody who was caught with tulip
bulbs when the bubble burst.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, I mean it affected the wealthy obviously in some cases,
but it also affected a lot of those people that
were looking to get wealthy and did sometimes you know,
make a lot of money during this you know, less
than two year period. But you know, like I said,
some people sold their homes and all of a sudden,
they don't have a home and they're stuck with all
these tulips. The trades people who you know sold their
(08:45):
tools because they were like, hey, I'm in the tulip
game now I don't need these iron working skills or tools.
All of a sudden they couldn't even go back to
that trade because they didn't have the stuff they needed
to do it. And the people who bought those future
contracts were the people that were really really in trouble.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Right, Yeah, because again you're saying, I will buy a
thousand tulip bulbs in four weeks at you know, a
million dollars, and when the bubble burst and those tulip
the thousand bulbs were now worth one thousand dollars and
you're on the hook to pay a million dollars for them. Yeah,
(09:22):
those speculators were like I'm not I'm sorry, I'm not
doing this, or they can't. Yeah, they might not have
been able to any longer. But the suppliers who had
these tulip bulbs and were technically owed a million dollars
regardless of what the tulip bulbs were were worth. They
won their bet, but they they still the buyers would
(09:44):
not pay the suppliers, and that's what really created this
huge financial crisis, and it got bad enough. At first
the Dutch governments of the big cities and I think
the monarchy did not get involved. They did not want
to get involved. The courts were like, we're not going
to hear any cases because these are bets as far
as the law is concerned, and a bet isn't legally binding.
(10:08):
But it was so bad. The Dutch economy was in
such tatters because so many people had gotten into tulips
chuck that they just like you said, trades, people just
sold their tools, people sold their houses. The regular economy
that was built on that kind of work and stuff
like that, it sagged. It was unmaintained during this tulip mania.
(10:28):
So it was a big problem that the Dutch had.
So finally some of the higher ups got involved and
tried to figure this out.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Well, they tried to, yeah, not too much effect, but
they the courts finally said, all right, we have to
do something here, So why don't we work out a
deal where the traders paid ten percent of the contract's
face value. But nobody was happy with that because the
suppliers were still losing tons of money. The buyers still
were in bad shape because the value of those tulips
(10:57):
just you know, plummeted and ten percent of future contract
was a lot more than they were worth now. And so,
you know, nobody really won in the end, and it
wrecked the Dutch economy for you know, it took a
couple of decades to sort of naturally heal itself back
to where it was.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, that's what the Dutch government ultimately decided to do,
is nothing, and it just had to mend itself naturally
as people got back to work and people sold their
tulip bulbs for way less. But they did sell their
tulip bulbs because the Dutch were still and are still
kind of crazy for tulips. Oh yeah, I read that
they still pay higher prices than other countries for tulip
(11:38):
bulbs because people just know that the Dutch are crazy
for tulips and they'll pay it. And I guess about
this time of year every year, the Dutch country side
just explodes in color.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, it's gorgeous. And I can also recommend a classic
Conan O'Brien bitt when he used to go on location
and do remote stuff. He has a very very funny
one from I believe his first iteration of his show
where he and Andy went to Amsterdam and went out
(12:09):
with the camera to the tulip farms and the tulip markets,
and it was very very funny.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
I'm sure you can still find out. Thanks. Thanks for
the recommendation. You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
I have no other recommendations other than plant tulip bulbs.
They're gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Yeah, and beware economic bubbles. Yeah, that too short. Stuff
is app.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh and
there's Chuck and Jerry sitting in for a Dave. And
this is short stuff about tulip mania.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
That's right. Tulip Mania was perhaps the first financial bubble
to happen and then burst. And we should probably talk
a little bit about what an economic bubble is, don't
you think.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
Yeah, it's where the price of a good or an
asset or something like that. Let's just say item sure
goes sky high way way way beyond any reasonable value
that it should have, and it's because of exuberant trading.
And the more exuberant the trading is, the more people
get sucked in by it, and they want to make
some money too, so more people start investing, and the
(00:49):
prices keep going higher and higher and higher. That's the
first part of the bubble. There's another less happy side
of the bubble too.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
That's right, because as anyone who's ever been to a
bubble rave or a played bubbles with your kids or
just adult friends who enjoy bubbling, that bubble's going to burst.
They all will eventually, And that's what happens with an
economic bubble too. The price will drop usually pretty quickly,
and a lot of people start selling off very quickly,
(01:20):
and those who get out early enough can usually avoid it.
But every single time, someone is going to be left
holding that asset that is all of a sudden not
worth much of anything. And a lot of times the
people have invested their entire life savings in this stuff.
A lot of times they've bought this stuff on credit,
and all of a sudden, this thing isn't worth that
much money and they're in real, real financial trouble.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
Yeah, it's a bad scene.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
And so, like you said, all the way back in
the seventeenth century, people consider the first economic bubble to
have surrounded tulips and tulip bulbs in Holland.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
That's right. And when you said tulip mania, that's really
what it was called. You weren't just being cheeky.
Speaker 1 (02:00):
No, that's what it's referred to. I'm sure among economists,
among historians, among the Dutch, among podcasters, it's called tulipmania.
That wasn't just me being funny.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
So a little bit about tulips native to places like
Kazakhstan and Eastern Europe and the Himalayas. They don't look
like the tulips in their original form that we think
of today, but they've been cultivated over the years and
you know, cross bread to where they look like they
look like tulips. Now, these these beautiful we have tulips
popping up here in Atlanta already this spring and they're lovely.
(02:39):
They're grown from bulbs and they're I don't know about
how easy or hard it is, but they, like I said,
are cross bread to create new and exciting varieties and colors.
Speaker 1 (02:49):
Yeah. So tulips first arrived in Holland around sixteen hundred.
The Dutch East India Company was moving spices and exotic
goods from the East to Europe, Holland in particular, and
tulips arrived. And for the first couple decades they were
you know, if you were a plant enthusiast, you probably
(03:11):
had a tulip in your collection. If you were very,
very rich and just wanted to show off how cutting
edge you were, you might have some tulips in your garden.
But they weren't a big deal until sixteen thirty four.
And the reason they became a big deal almost overnight,
was because those same upper classes and nobility in Holland
(03:32):
decided that tulips were now a status symbol, and that
if you didn't have tulips growing in your garden and
you were a member of the aristocracy or nobility, you
were a total loser with a capital A.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
That's right. So in this case you had, economically speaking,
you had a big time demand all of a sudden.
But not only was it a big time demand, it
was a big time demand of people that had a
lot of money. So the price went through the roof
very quickly. A bulb, a single bulb, one tulip bulb,
(04:06):
would fetch two thousand florin, And just to put it
into perspective of what you could buy back then, for
two thousand florin, sixteen thousand pounds of cheese, two hundred
and fifty tons of beer, a couple of hundred sheep,
or maybe sixteen grown oxen. And they were paying prices
in today's dollars. Thank you Investipedia for doing this weird translation,
(04:29):
but in today's dollars for a single tulip bulb, they
were paying fifty grand, one hundred and fifty grand even
sometimes for the rarest varieties, up to a million dollars
for a single bulb.
Speaker 1 (04:39):
Yeah, that fifty you do one hundred and fifty grand.
That was like day to day stuff, right, that's what
a single tulip bulb, single bulb. It was nuts. Even
at the time, there were people who were watching this
and they're like, this is crazy. They're tulips, for God's sake.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
Yeah, They're riding out a giant check with a feathered
pen and they're just like, I can't believe I'm paying
this amount of money.
Speaker 1 (05:04):
For exactly I say, we take a break and come
back and talk more about tulip mania, Okay, Chuck. So
(05:35):
we were just talking about how crazy expensive a single
tulip bulb was in Holland in the sixteen thirties.
Speaker 2 (05:41):
Single tulip bulbs.
Speaker 1 (05:43):
Right, So, some people among the wealthy would use like
significant portions of their fortune, of their wealth to buy
tulips and just grow them. They weren't reselling them, they
weren't doing anything. They were buying tulips and growing them.
They were spending half of their worth to buy tulips
just to show off. Right.
Speaker 2 (06:03):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
At some point people started saying, like I think that
if I start buying tulips and then selling them for
a higher price, I could really make some money. And
as a matter of fact, I can start speculating where
I will go into futures contracts with people and say, hey,
I'll sell you X number of tulips in three weeks
for X number of dollars because I'm betting that the
(06:25):
price is going to go down, but you're betting that
the price is going to go up. Let's see who wins.
And speculation is one of the main drivers essentially of
an economic bubble. Like it's crazy that the single bulbs
were going for that. But once people started speculating and
creating like instruments and futures contracts based on that crazy
(06:47):
high price, that's when it really started to get troublesome.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Yeah, for sure, they were actually sold on the Dutch
stock Exchange, and these were, you know, some wealthy investors,
but everybody got in on the gang, like the gang
the game, just regular middle working class people, even like
people of the lower classes. They started cashing in everything
(07:12):
they could, selling their houses, in some cases, selling the
tools of their trade that they were previously making money
on to invest in these tulips. And you know what's
going to happen is that eventually is going to burst
and it did so less than two years after this
frenzied investment stuff started in sixteen thirty six.
Speaker 1 (07:32):
Yeah, the bubble bursts because some people, like we said
earlier that there were some people who are like, this
is crazy, and even some speculators and people who are
invested in tulips were like, this is not going to
last much longer. I'm going to get out. And as
more people started to decide to get out, you can
trigger a panic. And if you trigger a panic, all
(07:53):
of a sudden, the bubble bursts and the price just
drops precipitously. And that's what happened with the tulip mania bubble.
A bunch of people who had large stocks of tulip
bulbs when the price dropped almost overnight, were ruined financially.
They had, say, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of
(08:13):
tulips that they'd paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for
that were now worth hundreds of dollars, and it was
a bad jam for anybody who was caught with tulip
bulbs when the bubble burst.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
Yeah, I mean it affected the wealthy obviously in some cases,
but it also affected a lot of those people that
were looking to get wealthy and did sometimes you know,
make a lot of money during this you know, less
than two year period. But you know, like I said,
some people sold their homes and all of a sudden,
they don't have a home and they're stuck with all
these tulips. The trades people who you know sold their
(08:45):
tools because they were like, hey, I'm in the tulip
game now I don't need these iron working skills or tools.
All of a sudden they couldn't even go back to
that trade because they didn't have the stuff they needed
to do it. And the people who bought those future
contracts were the people that were really really in trouble.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
Right, Yeah, because again you're saying, I will buy a
thousand tulip bulbs in four weeks at you know, a
million dollars, and when the bubble burst and those tulip
the thousand bulbs were now worth one thousand dollars and
you're on the hook to pay a million dollars for them. Yeah,
(09:22):
those speculators were like I'm not I'm sorry, I'm not
doing this, or they can't. Yeah, they might not have
been able to any longer. But the suppliers who had
these tulip bulbs and were technically owed a million dollars
regardless of what the tulip bulbs were were worth. They
won their bet, but they they still the buyers would
(09:44):
not pay the suppliers, and that's what really created this
huge financial crisis, and it got bad enough. At first
the Dutch governments of the big cities and I think
the monarchy did not get involved. They did not want
to get involved. The courts were like, we're not going
to hear any cases because these are bets as far
as the law is concerned, and a bet isn't legally binding.
(10:08):
But it was so bad. The Dutch economy was in
such tatters because so many people had gotten into tulips
chuck that they just like you said, trades, people just
sold their tools, people sold their houses. The regular economy
that was built on that kind of work and stuff
like that, it sagged. It was unmaintained during this tulip mania.
(10:28):
So it was a big problem that the Dutch had.
So finally some of the higher ups got involved and
tried to figure this out.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Well, they tried to, yeah, not too much effect, but
they the courts finally said, all right, we have to
do something here, So why don't we work out a
deal where the traders paid ten percent of the contract's
face value. But nobody was happy with that because the
suppliers were still losing tons of money. The buyers still
were in bad shape because the value of those tulips
(10:57):
just you know, plummeted and ten percent of future contract
was a lot more than they were worth now. And so,
you know, nobody really won in the end, and it
wrecked the Dutch economy for you know, it took a
couple of decades to sort of naturally heal itself back
to where it was.
Speaker 1 (11:15):
Yeah, that's what the Dutch government ultimately decided to do,
is nothing, and it just had to mend itself naturally
as people got back to work and people sold their
tulip bulbs for way less. But they did sell their
tulip bulbs because the Dutch were still and are still
kind of crazy for tulips. Oh yeah, I read that
they still pay higher prices than other countries for tulip
(11:38):
bulbs because people just know that the Dutch are crazy
for tulips and they'll pay it. And I guess about
this time of year every year, the Dutch country side
just explodes in color.
Speaker 2 (11:49):
Yeah, it's gorgeous. And I can also recommend a classic
Conan O'Brien bitt when he used to go on location
and do remote stuff. He has a very very funny
one from I believe his first iteration of his show
where he and Andy went to Amsterdam and went out
(12:09):
with the camera to the tulip farms and the tulip markets,
and it was very very funny.
Speaker 1 (12:14):
I'm sure you can still find out. Thanks. Thanks for
the recommendation. You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (12:19):
I have no other recommendations other than plant tulip bulbs.
They're gorgeous.
Speaker 1 (12:23):
Yeah, and beware economic bubbles. Yeah, that too short. Stuff
is app.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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