Examples
Two famous early stock market bubbles were the Mississippi Scheme in France and the South Sea bubble in England. Both bubbles came to an abrupt end in 1720, bankrupting thousands of unfortunate investors. Those stories, and many others, are recounted in Charles Mackay's 1841 popular account, "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds".
The two most famous bubbles of the twentieth century, the bubble in American stocks in the 1920s just before the Great Depression and the Dot-com bubble of the late 1990s were based on speculative activity surrounding the development of new technologies. The 1920s saw the widespread introduction of an amazing range of technological innovations including radio, automobiles, aviation and the deployment of electrical power grids. The 1990s was the decade when Internet and e-commerce technologies emerged.
Other stock market bubbles of note include the Encilhamento occurred in Brazil during late 1880s and early 1890s, the Nifty Fifty stocks in the early 1970s, Taiwanese stocks in 1987 and Japanese stocks in the late 1980s.
Stock market bubbles frequently produce hot markets in Initial Public Offerings, since investment bankers and their clients see opportunities to float new stock issues at inflated prices. These hot IPO markets misallocate investment funds to areas dictated by speculative trends, rather than to enterprises generating longstanding economic value. Typically when there is an over abundance of IPOs in a bubble market, a large portion of the IPO companies fail completely, never achieve what is promised to the investors, or can even be vehicles for fraud.
Read more about this topic: Stock Market Bubble
Famous quotes containing the word examples:
“It is hardly to be believed how spiritual reflections when mixed with a little physics can hold people’s attention and give them a livelier idea of God than do the often ill-applied examples of his wrath.”
—G.C. (Georg Christoph)
“In the examples that I here bring in of what I have [read], heard, done or said, I have refrained from daring to alter even the smallest and most indifferent circumstances. My conscience falsifies not an iota; for my knowledge I cannot answer.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)
“Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.”
—Alexander Pope (1688–1744)