In 1593 tulips were brought from Turkey and introduced to the Dutch. The novelty of the new flower made it widely sought after and therefore fairly pricey...The true bulb buyers...began to fill up inventories for the growing season, depleting the supply...and increasing scarcity and demand. Soon, prices were rising so fast...that people were trading their land, life savings, and anything else... to get more tulip bulbs. Many Dutch persisted in believing they would sell their hoard to hapless and unenlightened foreigners, thereby reaping enormous profits. Somehow, the originally overpriced tulips enjoyed a twenty-fold increase in value - in one month!...Prices were not an accurate reflection of the value of a tulip bulb. As it happens in many speculative bubbles, some prudent people decided to sell and crystallize their profits. A domino effect of progressively lower and lower prices took place as everyone tried to sell while not many were buying. The price began to dive, causing people to panic...Dealers refused to honor contracts and people began to realize they had traded their homes for a piece of greenery...The government attempted to...halt the crash by offering to honor contracts at 10% of the face value...the market plunged even lower, making such restitution impossible. No one emerged unscathed from the crash. Even the people who had locked in their profit by getting out early suffered under the following depression....Crashes: The Tulip and Bulb Craze, Investopedia.com
Sounds like what Wonker was describing, except that it happened four hundred years ago with a group of the soberist merchants in Europe. Add in a large quotient of political manipulation, à la George Soros and his friends in Russia, China and Teheran, and you have a modern tulip market. This writer feels the political coordination of the oil price runup is at least as important as speculation, and that it involves Greens, Russia, Saudia Arabia, China, Iran, and 5th column Democrats in the United States. These otherwise competing groups have a common goal: panic in the United States, panic that would depress large markets, such as housing and energy. For the Greens, this panic might well yield wholesale abandonment of the suburbs and of the automobile. For Russia, not so subtle since the Reds bailed out in 1991, it's just the money. For China, it's another tool in an ongoing asymmetric war with the United States in which Beijing has already allied itself with Islamic terrorists. For Iran and Saudi Arabia, a panicked United States offers a freer hand in an ongoing war of competing visions of Islamic domination of the future. For 5th column Democrats, panic among constituents gives them yet another chance to pitch "change," i.e., the failed leftist policies of the last 100 years.
The writer offers this little ditty for those who are unhappy about being used:
Oh, ye sucker-punched masses,
Praying for relief
The kick you felt in your asses
Commenced with false belief.
Luther
No comments:
Post a Comment