Trading the Wind

Four Centuries of Bubbles, Panics, and Financial Crises, from Tulip Mania to Silicon Valley

von Marco Fancelli

128 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

In the winter of 1637, Dutch merchants bought and sold tulip bulbs they had never seen. What changed hands in the taverns of Haarlem was not the bulb but a promise - resold a dozen times in an evening, for delivery months away. They had a name for it: windhandel. The wind trade.

Four centuries later, $42 billion left Silicon Valley Bank in a single day, moved by messages in private group chats.

Between those two mornings lie nineteen crises, four centuries, and one remarkably consistent human being.

Trading the Wind is a narrative history of financial panic - from the South Sea Bubble that cost Isaac Newton a fortune, to the 1929 crash, to the mortgage that a bank handed a man with three part-time jobs and no income verification, to the banking failures of 2023 and the debt now financing the artificial intelligence boom.

It is also a book about what didn't happen. Brokers did not throw themselves from Manhattan windows in droves; the statistics say otherwise. No sailor ate a priceless tulip bulb mistaking it for an onion. Separating the documented from the merely well-loved is one of this book's central purposes.

No equations. No jargon. Just merchants, bankers, presidents and ordinary families making decisions that looked reasonable at the time and absurd a year later.

Because the ingredients are always the same: cheap credit, a convincing story, and the conviction that this time is different.

Written from Europe, about a mostly American story - which turns out to be a useful place to watch from.

• ISBN: 9798192893593
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 15.08.2026
• Größe: 216 x 140 mm
• Verlag: Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp