Trading Companies and Distribution of Speculative Bubbles within European Commodity and Stock Markets, 17-18 century

Abstract

The paper examines the first financial crises based on speculative exchange transactions with overseas goods and securities of trading companies. Based on the study of Tulip mania, as well as the bubble of the South Seas and Mississippi, the features of concluding transactions "for the future" with the supply of assets that do not exist at the moment, the possibility of production or procurement of which was based on skillfully spreading rumors, are described in detail. Attention is paid to the "behavior of the crowd" when, with insufficient regulation on the stock market, the broad masses of the population became participants in exchange trading, investing there not only their own, but sometimes also borrowed assets. The assessment of measures to prevent stock speculation in the context of the abolition of monopoly rights of trading companies and the liberalization of public relations is given. The main conclusion of the author is the dialectical interpretation of speculative crises of the XVII-XVIII centuries as, on the one hand, objectively previously unknown phenomena, for the prevention of which the government did not have enough knowledge and tools. On the other hand, crises became effective tools in carrying out structural transformations in societies of that time, breaking the established foundations, redistributing wealth, stimulating institutional changes, since the adoption of prohibitive measures in relation to speculation on the stock exchange would make it impossible overseas trade and expansion of trading companies abroad, which in fact was accompanied by a profitable robbery of colonies with the corresponding the flow of resources to Europe. Financial crises based on speculation and "air" trading persist to the present and often become global, which, in the author's opinion, is due to the impossibility of introducing total control over new financial instruments for investing abroad and an ambiguous assessment of the profitability of such activities in the future.