Crashes, Bubbles & Collapses: The Contrarian Library

In February 1637, a tulip bulb sold for the price of a canal-side house in Amsterdam. The Dutch had been warned. They did not listen. Nobody ever does.

Crashes, Bubbles & Collapses is the first volume in The Contrarian's Library — 75 entries on the financial disasters, speculative manias, and institutional failures that shaped the modern world. Each entry opens with a single verified fact chosen specifically because it contradicts what most people believe. The entries that follow explain how that fact was possible, what it produced, and why the official version left out the interesting part.

You will find the tulip mania here — and discover that it was considerably less catastrophic than advertised. You will find the 1929 crash — and learn that the crash itself was not what caused the Depression. You will find John Law, who single-handedly ran the French economy for three years and died broke in Venice. J.P. Morgan, who stopped a financial panic by locking competing bankers in his library and refusing to let them leave. Nick Leeson, who hid £827 million in losses in an account he had opened by accident and found, subsequently, rather useful. The Federal Reserve, which responded to the worst economic crisis in modern history by raising interest rates.

Each of these stories has a version that appears in textbooks. This book contains the other one.

75 entries. Every hook fact independently verified. All the parts that tend to get left out.