In the winter of 1636-37, most tulip trades in Holland weren't bulb sales. They were promises to buy bulbs still underground, traded in taverns and resold several times before anyone took delivery.

When prices broke in February 1637, the question became whether those contracts were enforceable. In the end, many buyers were allowed to walk away by paying a small fraction of the agreed price, which turned what were effectively futures into something closer to options.

Historians like Anne Goldgar have argued the "mania" was smaller and less ruinous than the popular story suggests. So was it a real bubble, or a contract-settlement crisis that later moralists exaggerated?

I made a 13-minute video on how this worked: https://youtu.be/06CWRzFj75E

The story of how the British Empire got rich is one of the most distorted chapters in modern history. For generations, textbooks have told us that Britain became the wealthiest nation on Earth through industrial genius, scientific innovation, and sheer hard work. The steam engine. The spinning jenny. The factory system. But when you follow the actual money trail through tax ledgers, shipping manifests, and the private letters of the men who built the empire, a very different picture emerges.

In this deep-dive investigation, we uncover the real origins of British imperial wealth, from the 1600 royal charter that created the East India Company to the hidden offshore financial empire that still operates out of the City of London today. We trace the Battle of Plassey in 1757, where a thirty-two-year-old clerk named Robert Clive used bribes, forged treaties, and a conspiracy with Mir Jafar to seize the richest province in India for a private corporation. We examine the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1770, which killed between seven and ten million people while East India Company revenues actually increased. We explore the Caribbean sugar economy, the transatlantic slave trade, and the long-suppressed thesis of Eric Williams, whose 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery was not published in a mainstream British edition until 2022.

We also break down the single most shocking fiscal fact in British history. In 1833, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Act and paid twenty million pounds, roughly forty percent of the national budget, to compensate slave owners for the loss of their human property. The enslaved people themselves received nothing. The loan taken out to finance that payment was not fully paid off until 2015.

In the late 1800’s-early 1900’s banking system, all country banks had deposits in the money centers, mainly New York.

When farmers pulled cash for the harvest, this less to draws on reserves from New York, and the New York banks raised rates for call loans to stock speculators.

The creation of the Federal Reserve in 1913 solved this seasonal liquidity issue.

But the artifact of this seasonal issue of tightening liquidity in the fall is one explanation for the seasonal predisposition for large downward moves in stocks in the fall.

For other explanations, this is a good summary of the “Halloween effect” in markets: https://journalistsresource.org/economics/halloween-strategy-stock-market-lore-or-scary-real/

Made a documentary on the internal history of Arthur Andersen, and the thing that surprised me most in the research wasn't anything to do with Enron directly — it's how far back the structural problem actually goes.

In the 1970s, under Leonard Spacek's successors, Andersen introduced what former partner Barbara Ley Toffler describes in her book Final Accounting as a roughly 2-to-1 quota — every audit partner was expected to sell about twice their audit fee in consulting services to the same client they were auditing. Bill a client $10,000 for the audit, and you were on the hook to bring in another $20,000 in consulting revenue from that same relationship.

The documentary traces this from Andersen's 1913 founding — when the firm's own founder reportedly turned down a client who wanted him to alter a report, famously saying there wasn't enough money in Chicago to make him do it — through the slow erosion of that culture over the following decades, and into the specific mechanics of the Enron relationship: the SPEs, the mark-to-market lobbying, the roughly $52 million a year Enron was paying the firm by 2001, split between audit and consulting fees.

It also covers a case that gets far less attention than Enron — the SEC's 2001 enforcement action against Andersen over the Waste Management audits, which resulted in a $7 million penalty, the largest ever levied against an accounting firm at the time. That case shows the exact same structural failure — junior auditors flagging real problems, senior partners overruling them because of non-audit revenue tied to the same client — playing out years before Enron ever became a client.

Link: https://youtu.be/FuxHEAr4lgw?si=oA54GwMfW3DaBg2V

Happy to go deeper on any of the sourcing in the comments — most of it comes from the Powers Committee Report, SEC enforcement records, and congressional testimony from 2002.

Found this video essay that discusses 500 years of renting in capitalism to essentially answer why today no one can afford to buy a house / rents are incredibly high. I think the historic angle is quite interesting and makes some interesting points (like the importance of land use and its changing value linked to new means of transportation etc.). It also develops a "history of landlords" in a way that is quite intersting cause it establishes a narrative throughout the centuries that I havent seen like that before. In the end the essay breaks with this though and argues that today it is not about landlords, greed or supply side issues but that land value is essential for modern rent prices. Can only recommend!

In this short video, John Cochrane revisits Alexander Hamilton’s approach to the large public debt left by the Revolutionary War. Rather than repudiate the debt or inflate it away, Hamilton argued, the new United States should honor its contracts and repay creditors (original and secondary alike) according to their original terms—even at substantial short-term cost—to establish the country’s financial reputation and to preserve its ability to borrow in the future. Cochrane argues that Hamilton also understood the danger of allowing debt to grow without a plan for repayment. Federal assumption of state debts required the federal government to have the taxing authority to service them, while creditors themselves created a political constituency for sound public finances. Cochrane sees an enduring, if simple, principle in this history: New debt should always come with the means to repay it.

Hey everyone!

My name is Thomas, I'm an economics and history nerd who just finished a documentary about the petrodollar system and how the US dollar actually holds the global order together. I figured I'd post on this subreddit for any of those who are interested in the history of how the current global economic system actually formed.

I start by actually discussing Roman currency debasement and the denarius, because I think the comparison to what happened to the dollar after 1971 is more useful than most people realize, and then I trace the whole story from Bretton Woods through the Nixon shock to the 1974 Saudi arrangement.

I made this because I genuinely could not find a single video that explained the full loop clearly. Why is oil priced in dollars? Why does that force countries to accumulate dollars? How do those dollars flow back into American debt, and how that debt funds everything else like the military to protect those dollars?

I would love to hear from people here who know this period well, especially if I got something wrong. My main sources can be found in the description and are Sargent's "Pax Americana" (Diplomatic History, 2018), Layne's "This Time It's Real" (International Studies Quarterly, 2012), and Mueller's "Pax Americana Is a Myth" (The Washington Quarterly, 2020).

All the best!
Thomas