Unfortunately I was left with the impression from Garber’s book that in the sequel he will deny that there was ever a dot com/TMT bubble and crash.

There was a South Sea Bubble and it had big political impacts. And John Law’s invention of paper money (the French Louisiana Bubble) was also very real.

Economists like to say there are no bubbles, and if it was a bubble, we would only know afterwards.

But there’s a wealth of evidence there are bubbles. Everyone remembers the dot com one, (although in fact the media-telecommunications one was far, far larger), but this is only one of many—see John Brooks ‘The Go Go Years’ for the tech bubble – of 1960 to 1964. Any stock with ‘tech’ in the company name went through the roof.

Or see Shanghai’s stockmarket right now. Or the Saudi Arabian one until the middle of last year.

No I haven’t. It’s perfectly possible that the book is an accurate and in-depth investigation of the events, but I don’t see any evidence that either the FT reviewer or Chris probed this. If a core message of the book is “Don’t take exemplary stories on faith alone” it seems to have fallen on deaf ears.

or: “The last charge you make against this book is [itself a mark of] shoddiness.”

careful with that interpolating iron.

Great. As a quick dip into this literature soon demonstrates, crucial subtext issues in all this relate to whether asset price bubbles are irrational and whether the Efficient Market Hypothesis holds up.

I’m entirely prepared to accept that claims about Dutch Tulipmania in the early 17th century owe more to myth than historical fact. But I’m far less willing to write-off the possibility of “irrational exuberance” in asset prices.

The South Sea Bubble literature reverts to that topical debate more starkly, starting with a famous contemporary commentary by Daniel Defoe:

“A year before the world’s first great stockmarket crash in 1720, Daniel Defoe wrote his famous condemnation of the broking community. The Anatomy of Exchange Alley (1719) describes in detail various alleged market manipulations and sham reports generated to push up stock prices to the advantage of the perpetrators. ‘Tis a compleat system of knavery; that ’tis a trade founded in fraud, born of deceit, and nourished by trick, cheat, wheedle, forgeries, falsehoods,’ he blustered.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/82e34474-f4b4-11db-b748-000b5df10621.html

Sadly, I can’t find an online link to Defoe’s tract.

I doubt you have read this book, let alone the notes or you would realise that Goldgar has gone back to the original documents in Haarlem, Amsterdam, Enkhuizen, Leiden and elsewhere to examine what they actually say.

It is shoddy to repeat mistakes made by people who read the documents in the 1920s. It is shoddy to repeat hoary myths that go back to Mayhew and beyond without substantiating them from the primary sources. The last charge you make against this book is shoddiness.

I imagine there may be some evidence in the book, which I’m disinclined to praise or damn until I’ve read it. If you like, I can point to my own review when I’ve done so.

BTW: “rebunking” strikes me as a useful term, possibly relevant to the conservapedia chatter upstream. Thanks.

And this is evidenced by what? Shoddy rebunkings of shoddy myths are almost as ubiquitous as shoddy myths, as the QWERTY dust-up or D²’s flawed retelling of the flawed history of the Budweiser brand has amply demonstrated.

Isn’t this essentially the prospectus for some hedge funds?

The day of the last payment he wanted to know if I’d be interested in buying the cards back. The bubble had just burst, and he was now expecting to get $40.00 for the lot.