>> 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

Der Beitrag der FT (das Buch bleibt abzuwarten) ist - mit Verlaub - schwach, deshalb bin ich auch gestern nicht groß drauf eingegangen.

Der Meister Garber hat übersehen, dass:

a) die Tulpen auf Termin gehandelt wurden (es gab dazu bunte Büchlein, extrem rar!), in denen die Tulpen abgebildet waren. Die Einschüsse waren minimal bis Null. Die Kontrakte konnten nach dem Crash (siehe das Buch von Mike Dash, dazu ein früheres Posting von mir) nicht vollstreckt werden - was den Kredit weitgehend zum Erliegen brachte (vgl. die"crédit-est-mort"-Darstellungen der Folgezeit). Erst mit dem genialen Johan de Witt begann in den 1650er Jahren wieder ein Aufschwung in Holland, der als erstes die Reduzierung der Staatsschulden zum Inhalt hatte.

b) Allererste Adressen fallierten, am bewegndsten (und zugleich unbekanntesten) ist das Schicksal Rembrandts, der bis 1637 lauter"Floras" malte, dann in Konkurs ging (wollte sein Haus mit Hilfe von Tulpenprofiten abbezahlen, was schief ging) und nie mehr eine Tulpe sehen (und malen) wollte und in Schwermut versank (siehe seine Bilder vorher und nachher). Und sich schließlich an der Sparbüchse seines Kindes vergriff.

c) Eine breite Pamphlete-Lietratur einsetzte (ob sie von Garber zitiert werden, bezweifle ich, werde das aber checken, da ich einige diese Rarissima besitze). Dabei wird die Narretei der Zocker ausführlichst beschrieben und der Lächerlichkeit preisgegeben. In einem der Pamphlete ist auch eine Preisliste, die ich leider hier nicht reinstellen kann, die aber bei zahlreichen Stücken auf mehrere 1000 fl. reicht (= Gegenwert eines Stadthauses usw.). Es gibt auch einen berühmten Kupferstich"Floras Narrenkappe", den Dash nicht veröffentlicht hat.

d) Holland suchte einen Ausweg - wie immer, wenn's südwärts geht mit der Wirtschaft - im Krieg und konnte die Spanier 1639 an der englischen Küste aus dem Rennen um die Seeherschaft werfen, ein Glücksumstand (brillanter Admiral Tromp).

Aber warten wir mal das Buch ab. Ich werde es dann schon filettieren. Der Vorwurf Garbers, dass ausgerechnet die FT, die Hauspostille der kapitalistischen Internationale auf irrationales Doom-Gerede macht, ist nachgerade lächerlich. Schon letztes Jahr hat Sam Brittan (der intelligeneste Kopf dieses grandiosen Blattes und Bruder des EU-Mannes Leo Brittan) den Klassiker geschrieben"Bubbles Must Burst" (PFLICHTLEKTÜRE), und was ein Bubble-Bursting anno 2000 (oder wann auch immer) bedeutet, werden wir ja sehen. Das bisschen Luft-Rauslassen in den USA zeigt ja schon deutliche realwirtschaftliche Spuren, wie man jeden Tag lesen kann (nicht nur in der FT).

Dann ist mir auch die Person des Absenders suspekt (Deutsche Bank,"global strategist", hoffentlich ist es nicht wieder einer jener überbezahlten Endzwanzigern oder Mittdreißigern, die uns mit ihren"there's only one way - up!"-Analysen erbauen). Auch das MIT hat sicher im Augenblick nichts gerade das schönste Depot.

Lassen wir uns also überraschen.

d.






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