Devil take the hindmost : a history of financial speculation

Includes bibliographical references (pages 351-370) and index.

1. "This bubble world": the origins of financial speculation 2. Stockjobbing in 'Change Alley: the projecting age of the 1690s 3. "The never-to-be-forgot or forgiven South-Sea Scheme" 4. Fool's gold: the emerging markets of the 1820s 5. "A ready communication": the railway mania of 1845 6. "Befooled, bewitched and bedeviled": speculation in the gilded age 7. The end of a new era: the crash of 1929 and its aftermath 8. Cowboy capitalism: from Bretton Woods to Michael Milken 9. Kamikaze capitalism: the Japanese bubble economy of the 1980s.

Devil Take the Hindmost is a lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the seventeenth century to the present day. Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to "stockjobbing" in London's Exchange Alley (where wine sold at auction by an "inch of a candle"), to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1719, which prompted investor Sir Isaac Newton to comment, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the "assurance of female chastity;" credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton.