Boom and Bust
Boom and Bust is a global history of financial bubbles, covering major episodes from five different continents over the past 300 years. It uses this previously unwritten history to explain what causes bubbles, what their consequences are, and what the lessons are for investors and policymakers today. This book reveals that bubbles start when investors and speculators react to new technology or political initiatives, showing that our ability to predict future bubbles will ultimately come down to being able to predict these sparks.
Praise for Boom and Bust
"Where do financial bubbles come from? Can and should policymakers always try to stop them? Can investors avoid them? Quinn and Turner take us on an informative, engaging tour of the last three hundred years of bubbles and, using history as their guide, provide intriguing answers."
— Richard S. Grossman, author of WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn From Them
"Quinn and Turner argue that the essential elements of capital markets: money, credit, and speculation are also the necessary ingredients of financial bubbles. Can we have one without the other?"
— William Goetzmann, author of Money Changes Everything: How Finance Made Civilization Possible
"Quinn and Turner have made a major contribution to the literature on financial speculation and the bubbles to which they contribute. Not only do they provide an analytical dissection of ten salient episodes over some 300 years, they embed these narratives in an explanatory framework – the ‘bubble triangle' – that links the relative marketability of financial assets and the supply of credit to speculative excess. Thus, Boom and Bust shows how to mine history for meaning, with lessons relevant today for investors and policymakers alike."
— Bill Janeway, author of Doing Capitalism in the Innovation Economy: Reconfiguring the Three-Player Game between Markets, Speculators and the State