10/12/1999
Focusing on the development of market speculation, Chancellor's narrative begins with the tulipomania in seventeenth-century Holland, and then shifts to accounts of speculative manias such as the South Sea Bubble and the Railway Mania in Britain. From the mid-nineteenth century, the story centers on the United States, with chapters on the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, and the revival of speculation since the early 1970s. He comments throughout on speculation in the 1990s, including such issues as emerging markets, Internet and foreign-currency speculation, and rogue traders. Chancellor shows that impulses that have shaped speculative behavior are at odds with the theory of efficient markets.