21/07/2022
How Much Money Would You Pay for a Digital Picture? How About a Tulip?
What if I told you that a single tulip bulb was worth as much as a house?
Let me tell you a short story of what happened. In the 1630s, the Netherlands entered the Dutch Golden Age. Its capital city, Amsterdam became an important port and center of commercial trade. Thus, dominating global trade in anything from sugar and spice to almost everything. With this newfound prosperity, the Dutch people invented the middle-class to their societal hierarchy. For rich people, showing off is a necessity, so they always buy something to display their wealth. One of the products that were brought to Holland was a tulip. These tulips were slow to grow, it took around seven to twelve years for them to mature.
But whatโs so unique about this? Well, rare things are always bought with high value and rich people can only show off their wealth if they own something rare.
So going back to the tulips, there were tulips that had unusual colors and distinctive marks that made them stand out from the single-colored ones. This was due to the tulip-breaking virus which affects the tulip bulb, adding flame-like patterns to it. Because this type was so rare, they became the ultimate status symbol of the rich.
The demand for these tulips was high and the supply couldnโt keep up because of their rarity and their difficulty to grow. So the merchants had an idea. A brilliant idea. They started selling a promise of a future sale of the tulip. It is a contract that states the right to buy something for a certain price somewhere in the future. Nowadays, we call it futures.
Hereโs the exciting part, the middle-class saw an opportunity with the rapidly rising price of the tulips; so what happened was more and more people started buying the tulip futures so they can sell them at a higher price to make profits, then selling them again and again. Making the price of tulip bulbs rapidly rise to the point where you can trade it for a house.
As soon as the market price exceeds its worth, we have an economic bubble.
The real reason why the tulip reached an astronomical price was not because people want to own them, it was only because of speculation that the price will continue to go up.
All that is needed for a bubble to burst is the collective realization of people that the price of something far exceeds its worth.
In 1637, no one showed up at the flower auction that was hosted in Haarlem. The people realized that no one was actually willing to buy an expensive tulip as a means of owning them; this caused the flower market to collapse. The people who owned the tulip futures tried to sell their investment to minimize their losses; causing the price to drop rapidly. The price of tulips dropped from the equivalent of a house to almost a penny.
How ridiculous right?
Well, actually this kind of event always happens on a daily basis in the stock market, but just on a small scale. And it happens occasionally on large scales like in the dot com bubble of 2000, the US housing bubble of 2008, and currently happening again on NFTs.
History. Repeats. Itself.
No matter the era, the fundamentals are still the same; because human nature never changes. We will always be driven by either fear or greed, especially when it comes to earning or losing money.
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