Dutch Tulip Bulb Market Bubble

The Dutch Tulip Bulb Market Bubble is, surprisingly, precisely what it sounds like, and is super famous for just how big the tulip bulb bubble got.

The Dutch Tulip Bulb Market Bubble happened where the Dutch live—in Holland, part of the Netherlands—all the way back in the 1600s. Yep, we’ve been having market bubbles all the way back to at least the 1600s. No wonder economists think bubbles are inevitable.

The difference between then and now? In the early 2000s, we had a housing bubble. In the early 1600s, they had a tulip bulb bubble. Rare tulip bulbs were selling for 6x the average Joe’s annual salary. There was intense tulip speculation, as everyone jumped on board the tulip-trading train. You see, tulips were all the rage at the time...everyone was experiencing “Tulipmania.”

Eventually, the tulip bulb bubble burst, because the prices for them were so darn high that, eventually, people couldn’t pay the prices they said they would, and the tulip market caved in on itself. Sure, the tulip bulb market crash didn’t hurt the Holland economy like the housing market crash in ‘08 hurt U.S.’s economy...but it did still have the profound and lasting effects of disillusioned people from broken promises and expectations. That’s what happens when bubbles burst...we wake up from the trance we didn’t even know we were in. Sometimes it’s Tulipmania...sometimes it’s something else.

And none of this has anything to do with iconic The Rolling Stones cover, believe it or not, originally titled Two Lip Mania.