Boom and Bust

This is an academic work that is both readable and enjoyable and therefore, exceptional. The authors present ten different boom/bust scenarios that have occurred in a variety of time periods and geographic regions. They describe each situation in a way that allows the reader to be able to get a grasp on what happened without getting lost in minutiae. They go on to analyze the causes and the consequences of each situation. They introduce a simple, effective way to understand if a boom is occurring through the metaphor of the bubble triangle, akin to a fire triangle (fuel, air, heat). If 'speculation' is present along with enough excess 'money/credit', all that is needed is the promotional boost of what they term 'marketability' to begin the cycle that always seems to be new all over again. The authors state facts that reveal a deeper truth about human nature. When will we learn from our mistakes?

I bought this book based on an FT recommendation. It delivered well on the promise of being informative about the bubbles including the lesser known ones. It didn't really tell me anything I didn't know about the south sea, but on the bicycle bubble and the Australian land bubble is sure did. Very likely it will do the same for you. The strength of the book is in being systematic. it has a model for the 3 things that are needed to make a bubble, and it touches on those 3 things for every bubble in a convincing way. The weakness of the book is also in being systematic. It makes for quite a dry and repatative read and doesn't really focus on the many fun anecdotes that come with a financial bubble.

Provides a good background of market disruptions. Is AI a future bubble?

Quinn and Turner prefer to use the analogy of a "fire" to describe speculative bubbles. A fire is "destructive, self-perpetuating and difficult to control once it begins." And just as a fire needs oxygen, fuel, and heat, a speculative bubble needs assets that are easy to trade (i.e., oxygen), plenty of money and credit (fuel), and speculation (heat). It also needs a spark, which usually comes from government action or new technology. The authors describe how these key elements played out in 11 speculative booms since the 1700s: • French Mississippi Bubble (1719 to 1720) • British South Sea Bubble (1719 to 1720) • British Emerging Market Mines Bubble (1824 to 1826) • U.K. Railway Mania (1844 to1846) • Australian Land Boom (1886 to 1893) • The U.K. Bicycle Mania (1895 to 1898) • U.S. Roaring Twenties (1920 to 1931) • Japanese stock and real estate bubble (1985 to 1992) • U.S. Dot-Com Bubble (1995 to 2001) • U.S. and European Subprime Bubble (2003 to 2010) • the 2007 and 2015 Chinese stock bubbles. Some of the many interesting facts they uncover include: • The word "bubble" originated from Shakespeare in the 'All the world's a stage' speech from his comedy "As You Like It." He uses 'bubble' to mean "fragile, empty or worthless, just like a soap bubble." Beginning in 1719, with the South Sea Bubble, writers like Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift used "bubble" to describe new companies that were worthless. • Charles Mackay's 1841 book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds", which gives a vivid account of the foolish speculation during the South Sea Bubble, is mostly fiction: almost none of the anecdotes can be substantiated. • In 2008 The Economist described the British Railway Mania as "arguably the greatest bubble in history." • During the British Railway Mania of 1848, railway shares rose from constituting 23 percent of total stock market value to 71 percent. So many new speculators began buying railway stocks that 15 new stock exchanges opened in England during the mania to meet the demand. (Half of them shut down when the mania ended.) • Fueling the railway bubble was the Bank of England's low discount rate. At 2.5 percent in 1844, it was the lowest it had ever been in the 150 years of the bank's history. Investors bought railway stocks to earn a higher yield. • The Japanese government deliberately sparked the land and stock bubbles during the late 1980s to create a boom. Japan lowered interest rates, gave tax breaks to real estate developers, and allowed banks to accept land as collateral, which increased the amount of lending they could do, which was usually plowed back into more land and stocks. • The authors believe that the Dot-com bubble during the late 1990s had many good economic benefits, despite the 8-month recession that followed it. The bubble directed a lot of money into innovative companies and motivated smart entrepreneurs to create new companies. It also supplied the capital needed to build internet communications, which have been so critical for our lives today. • Between 2000 and 2008 in both Ireland and Spain, more than one new home was built for every new inhabitant in the country. • In the U.K., the bank Northern Rock marketed "Together mortgages," which allowed individuals to borrow up to 125 percent of their home value, targeting borrowers who could not afford to buy a home or even furnish it. • The Chinese stock market bubbles resembled the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles of 1720, where the bubbles were created deliberately to offload government debt onto stockholders. The main lesson from the book is that while bubbles can be blurry during the heat and smoke of a speculative fire, we should look for three key elements: asset marketability, speculation, and leverage.

Very well researched and easy to read with no technical jargons. I’m sold by the fact that the authors do not subscribe to the view that bubbles do not exist or can be identified ex ante as proponents of efficient market claim. The book attempts to show otherwise.

Whereas many watch traditional sports (football, basketball, soccer, or whatever) the sport I like to watch is the financial markets and all the drama that goes along with them (it can be VERY entertaining and certainly interesting). If you are similar, you absolutely have to read this book. People love to throw around the term "bubble" but this book really dives deep into its meaning, causes, effects and prevention strategies. This book really is a must read for anyone in the investing world.

This is an interesting educational book about financial bubbles. Learning about the 12 historical bubbles was intriguing and eye opening (the old sucker game). Some of the 1700 government-bank bubbles were difficult to understand, but over all a very good book.

This book well explains all the intricacies of how a bubble happens, and also talks about the times bubbles happened. Gives a good summary/conclusion at the end of each discussion of a certain bubble. 💯 good book!

The book analyzed the major cases of bubbles through a simple yet elegant framework explained in the first chapter. The authors approach the topic with the rigor of their academic background - don't expect any sensationalist sentence - yet it is much easier and enjoyable to read than many similar books I came across thanks to the simple writing style, to each chapter being a single case and to the constant reference to the base framework. I definitely recommend this book if you want to learn more on the topic of financial bubbles and am curious to see if the meme stonks mania of 2021(-?) will make it into a revised edition of the book.

Since I started my investment journey, the Great Crash of 1929 has been looming over my awareness, as something that I should know and understand as an investor. But without a background in financial knowledge, I always thought understanding it would be beyond me. This book, with its easily understandable framework, simple language and broad coverage of bubbles across time and space, has been enlightening, to say the least! Also, to me it subtly puts stocks into perspective, as an essential, but not the only ingredient, in an investment portfolio. A great read!

Avoiding buying into the peak of booms and selling at the bottom of a bust is one of key skills of any investor. But what causes them? This book attempts to answer that question by a close analysis of historical market manias. I found it a rather slow read to begin with but it proved to be a very thorough and interesting review of the subject. It covers bubbles through the ages such as the Mississippi and South Sea schemes back in the seventeen hundreds, through the railway and cycle manias plus Australian land boom of Victorian times to those in more living memory. That includes the Wall Street boom and 1929 crash, the Dot.com bubble of the 1990s and the sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2007/8. The latter resulted in a world-wide financial crisis with particularly damaging effects in the USA and UK. Banks had to be bailed out and bank shareholders lost their lifetime savings. But the dot.com bubble had relatively minor impacts on the general economy. I managed to sell a business and retire as a result of the dot.com bubble at the age of 50 because it was obvious that IT companies in general had become very highly valued. Software and internet businesses with no profits, even no sales, had valuations put on them that bore no relation to conventional valuations of businesses and forecasts of future profits were generally pie in the sky. One of the things the authors point out is that insiders generally benefit from booms while inexperienced retail investors and unwise speculators with little knowledge of an industry are often the losers. How are bubbles caused? The authors identify three big factors which they call the “bubble triangle” – speculation, money/credit and marketability. The latter is very important. For example, houses owned by occupiers tend to be part of markets that are sluggish and not prone to volatility as buying and selling houses is a slow process. But when sub-prime mortgages were created a whole new market was brought into being where mortgages could be easily traded. At the same time, the finance for mortgages was made easier to obtain. The latter was by driven by political decisions to encourage home ownership by easier credit and by the relaxation of regulations. Indeed it is obvious from reading the book that politicians are one of the major sources of booms. Governments can easily create booms, but they then have difficulty in controlling the excesses and managing the subsequent busts. The Dot.com boom was partly driven by technological innovation that attracted the imagination of the public and investors. It might have contributed positively to the development of new technologies, new services and hence to the economy, but most companies launched in that era subsequently failed or proved to be poor investments in terms of return on capital invested. Amazon is one of the few success stories. As the book points out, market bubbles tend to disprove the theory that markets are efficient. It is clear that sometimes they become irrational. There are particularly good chapters in the book on the Japanese land bubble in the 1980s and the development of China’s stock markets which may not be familiar to many readers. The authors tackle the issue of whether bubbles can be predicted and to some extent they can. But a good understanding of all the factors that can contribute is essential for doing so. Media comments can contribute to the formation of bubbles by promoting companies or technologies but can also suppress bubbles if they make informed comments. But this is what the authors say on the Bitcoin bubble and the impact of social media and blogs: “The average investor was much more likely to encounter cranks, uninformed journalists repeating the misinformation of cranks, bitcoin holders trying to attract new investors to increase its price and advertisements for bitcoin trading platforms”. They also say: “Increasingly the nature of the news media is shifting in a direction that makes it very difficult for informed voices to be heard above the noise”. The authors suggest that buying technology shares can be like a casino. Most of the bets will be losing ones but you may hit a jackpot. I would suggest you need to pay close attention to the business and its fundamentals when purchasing shares in such companies. In conclusion the book “Boom and Bust” is well worth reading by investors, and essential reading for central bankers and politicians! Roger Lawson

This book is kind of an abridged version of Devil Take the Hindmost framed through the author's theoretical framework on bubble formation (their triangle). For an academic book the writing is refreshingly concise and accessible. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in markets of any kind. I do hope they release a second edition to revisit Bitcoin once the dust settles.

A thorough research on the bubbles made in history. This book will definitely help amateur investors and the begginers a lot more. To be a special guide for governments and media people.