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This one speaks for itself. As we said with respect to the Ho Chi Minh boom in March (see Additional References below) and all the Shanghai maids that quit their day jobs to trade stocks in the June issue, “The higher it goes, the more certain we are of its eventual crash.” Stocks in a country that is considering forcing foreign-owned companies to sell half their shares to black citizens are up almost 40,000 times in a year. It’s even more absurd than a run on shares in a country where the concept of private ownership is less than a generation old. A mania is an exotic financial beast, but it’s not outside the pattern of social mood. In fact, they all act in essentially the same way. The wilder and more remote they get, the harder they fall.

Historical accounts of the Tulip Mania show that its last few weeks saw a reversal of the usual flight to quality. A dash from quality in the terminal stage of the advance reflected a “class difference” between the “nobleman, merchants, and shopkeepers...who traded in piece goods” and the rising influence of less experienced investors “trading in pound goods.” In Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds, Charles Mackay describes this progression from the aristocrats and money changers at the outset of the mania to “farmers, mechanics, seamen, footmen, maid-servants, even chimney sweeps and old clotheswomen” at the end, when “every one imagined that the passion for tulips would last for ever.” As a result, lower quality “pound goods” (like the Switzers) replaced by-the-bulb “piece goods” prices (like Goudas) as the primary object of speculation.