tulipmania-alles nicht so schlimm? FT 6.6.

verfasst von swirl, 07.06.2000, 14:16

> Today in Financial Times:
>
>
> COMMENT & ANALYSIS:
>
> The intrinsic value of tulips to Dutch investors: An economist
> challenges the view that manias such as that in the 17th-century
> Netherlands are always irrational
>
> Financial Times, Jun 6, 2000, 839 words
>
>
> Few events in economic history have captured the imagination of
> financial journalists like tulipmania in the Netherlands. In 1634, Dutch
> investors began snatching up rare tulip bulbs and trading them until
> their prices reached astral levels. At the fever's peak, a single Semper
> Augustus bulb went for the equivalent of Dollars 33,000. Other
> individual bulbs sold for the price of a well-appointed house, a much
> repeated comparison.
>
> But by February 1637, bulbs were plummeting. The tulip crash, as the
> story is often told, dragged the rest of the economy down with it.
> Tulipmania is said to represent the classic bubble, as codified in
> Palgrave's Dictionary of Political Economy (1926 edition):"Any unsound
> undertaking accompanied by a high degree of speculation". As such, it is
> taken to be the original model of the perils of the technology stock
> phenomenon.
>
> Wrong, says Peter Garber, a global strategist with Deutsche Bank. Mr
> Garber is grabbing attention on Wall Street and Silicon Alley these days
> with the argument that the tulip story should be revisited. He claims
> that the 17th-century tulip market, while by turns exuberant and
> plummeting, was far from irrational and not"unsound" in the Palgrave
> sense. It was also less destructive to the economy than generally
> alleged. His argument, while tulip-focused, is an attack on the very
> notion of the frothy market bubble. It is thus a striking counterpoint
> to the negativity of other hot scholars such as Robert Shiller, the
> author of Irrational Exuberance.
>
> Nor does the bold Mr Garber stop there; he also impugns the motives of
> gloom-meisters in the press, most prominently the Financial Times. He
> charges that we have used the tulip analogy and other well-known price
> spikes to damp technology enthusiasm."The wonderful tales from
> tulipmania are catnip," he says,"irresistible to those with a taste for
> crying bubble."
>
> Fighting words, indeed. So what is the substance of Mr Garber's
> argument? Fortunately, he has laid out his attack in a book called
> Famous First Bubbles: The Fundamentals of Early Manias, which is
> published next month by MIT Press - just in time, many sceptics will
> hope, for the author to be humiliated by a stock market crash.
>
> He starts by challenging the assumption that tulip prices were
> unreasonably high or, to put it in modern lingo, out of line with the
> fundamentals. He offers several reasons why tulips in fact had high
> intrinsic value in the Golden Age. The first is that the bubonic plague
> was sweeping the Netherlands during tulipmania. Faced with the prospect
> of a rapid end, the merchant class put a premium price on pleasure.
> Their chosen pleasure was to possess the rare flower.
>
> Mr Garber's second value argument stems from botany. The unusual beauty
> of the multicoloured and feathered tulip so prized by the Dutch was due
> to the Mosaic virus, which attacks the bulb and causes its flower to
> break into patterns. But Mosaic also reduces plant reproduction - in
> economic terms, it shifts the supply curve. Meanwhile, the ever-powerful
> force of fashion maintained strong demand."In France," he notes,"it
> became fashionable for women to array quantities of fresh tulips at the
> top of their gowns" and prices rose commensurately. In short, tulips
> were the pashmina scarves of their day.
>
> The author next assails the old certainty that tulips crashed
> precipitously. Tulipmania historians have long alleged that prices
> dropped by 90 per cent. But Mr Garber points out that the original
> document that gave rise to this claim, a 1637 paper issued by a group of
> Dutch florists, refers to a settlement price for forward contracts on
> bulbs, a very different thing from the price of the bulb itself.
>
> Moreover, his research shows that the fall in the tulip price may have
> been more of an orderly contraction than a rout. Tulips, hyacinths and
> other rarities continued to sell well after 1637 (Mr Garber's hyacinth
> detour is not to be missed). He notes that the principal chronicler of
> tulipmania, Charles Mackay, relied on prices dating 50 years after the
> spike to document the crash, too long a period to demonstrate the sudden
> death we associate with tulipmania.
>
> As for tulip bulbs fetching the price of a house, it was not unique to
> the 17th century. Figures from the Haarlem Bloembollencentrum show that
>"a small quantity of prototype lily bulbs" fetched Dollars 480,000 - or
> the price of a house - in 1987.
>
> Most interestingly of all, Mr Garber takes on the theory that the drop
> in tulip prices generated great economic distress. After poring over
> documents with the aid of Dutch-speakers, he concludes that there was
> scant sign of general collapse. The Netherlands of the mid-17th century
> actually enjoyed a powerful spurt of growth, something that Charles
> Kindleberger, one of Mr Garber's more prestigious targets, concedes in
> his book on the topic.
>
> If the parallel holds, then a crash in technology shares need not bring
> down other markets with it;"e-Street" is not Wall Street, let alone
> Main Street. It is a useful insight at a time when investors from
> Frankfurt to Tokyo hang nervously on the Nasdaq's every blip.
>
> But this column cannot close without addressing Mr Garber's hurtful
> assaults on the media. The question of whether journalists are natural
> bears is a good one. It is true that we are wary of seeming to"puff"
> markets, since blame for those markets' collapse will doubtless be laid
> at our door.
>
> Mr Garber's accusation of pessimism may be exaggerated. My own database
> hunt finds a mere 14 references to tulipmania in the FT archive. By
> contrast, new economy - a bullish phrase if there ever was one - pops up
> 99 times in story headlines alone. But this does not detract from Mr
> Garber's arguments, which ought to resonate in coming months, whatever
> the Nasdaq does.
>
> Copyright © The Financial Times Limited
>

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gesamter Thread:

• tulipmania-alles nicht so schlimm? FT 6.6. - swirl, 07.06.2000, 14:16
  • Re: tulipmania-alles nicht so schlimm? FT 6.6. - dottore, 07.06.2000, 14:54
    • Was soll das heißen 'Endzwanzigern oder Mittdreißigern'???? - ufi, 07.06.2000, 15:37
      • Ist ja nicht böse gemeint... ;-)) aber... - Taktiker, 07.06.2000, 15:57
        • Ich gebe dir Recht! o.T. - Sascha, 07.06.2000, 16:01
        • Mal abwarten! - Das Orakel, 08.06.2000, 01:09
      • Re: Was soll das heißen 'Endzwanzigern oder Mittdreißigern'???? - dottore, 07.06.2000, 17:05