moon_custafer | today in weird history

So according to this historian, the Tulipmania, which is used as a parallel for every stock market/beanie baby/bitcoin bubble, has always been wildly exaggerated in the telling:

Why have these myths persisted? We can blame a few authors and the fact they were bestsellers. In 1637, after the crash, the Dutch tradition of satirical songs kicked in, and pamphlets were sold making fun of traders. These were picked up by writers later in the 17th century, and then by a late 18th-century German writer of a history of inventions, which had huge success and was translated into English. This book was in turn plundered by Charles Mackay, whose Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds of 1841 has had huge and undeserved success. Much of what Mackay says about tulip mania comes straight from the satirical songs of 1637 – and it is repeated endlessly on financial websites, in blogs, on Twitter, and in popular finance books like A Random Walk down Wall Street.

Oh dear lord, this is actually the historical parallel to citing Onion articles as fact.

(Mackay is a fun read though.)