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    Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
    Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
    Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation
    Audiobook13 hours

    Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation

    Written by Edward Chancellor

    Narrated by Nigel Patterson

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Devil Take the Hindmost is a lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the seventeenth century to the present day. Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to "stockjobbing" in London's Exchange Alley (where wine sold at auction by an "inch of a candle"), to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1719, which prompted investor Sir Isaac Newton to comment, "I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people." Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the "assurance of female chastity;" credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateFeb 26, 2019
    ISBN9781977331052
    Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation

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    Reviews for Devil Take the Hindmost

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      The journal humour is very similar to tasting history YouTube channel.
    • 3/5
      A good interesting book that was strongest in the first half. The second half, especially the part about "Kamikaze Capitalism" starts to feel a bit bloated and unfocussed, which is very much a pity as there's a lot of gold in there. I had to keep checking the copyright date to confirm that it was, in fact, written a decade before the 2008 financial crisis, as he spends a fair amount of ink on the derivative market and its risk of bringing down the global economy. So it's really a pity that that portion of the book seemed a bit scatterbrained. Still, very much worth the time to read (and the $7 overdue fine I'll be paying for the privilege.)
    • 5/5
      Edward Chancellor carefully searches speculative history from the 17th Century onwards looking for commonality and differences in speculative situations and gives the history and his conclusions in this superb book.He's not writing with an "agenda" and common themes emerge in a quite natural way from his narrative:1) Speculation in modern times is closely connected with technological development eg. railways, electricity, automobiles, radio, computers, internet, etc. and this is undoubtedly positive as it directs capital at areas that offer fast increases in development and productivity.2) Speculation tends to need a widely publicised "success story" to take off eg. 1767 the Duke of Bridgewater's highly profitable 30 mile canal from the coalmine on his estate at Worsley to the new textile factories at Runcorn, or, in more modern times the shockingly successful 1995 Netscape Communications internet flotation.3) As a speculative area becomes widely subscribed excitement mounts, profitability declines and an urgent demand for credit (to speculate with) is met by the banks eg. 1720 the City exhausting its possibilities of lending against South Sea Company stock and the South Sea Company itself exhausting the possibilities of lending to its own buyers, or, more recently in 2007, (after this book was written), mortgage backed securities accommodating and extending the great New Millennium property speculation. 4) Late stage speculative booms combined with easy credit and lax government supervision attract a fine collection of opportunists and thieves floating overpriced (or worthless) shares onto a gullible public or issuing valueless bonds, eg. 1998 Yahoo! capitalization = 800 times earnings = $35 million per employee, or 1988 Michael Milken fabricating junk bonds (supposedly only junk in name) to finance the LBO wrecking of perfectly good companies for his and his friends vast profit. As the author says, "...junk bond purchasers taking most of the risk and "takeover entrepreneurs" snaffling most of the rewards." He quotes a Drexel employee, "In addition to being a talented creative genius, Micheal is one of the most avaricious, ruthless, venal people on the face of the earth".I can highly recommend this book, especially for the way the author evaluates the interaction between investment and speculation. Is investment a by product of speculation or is speculation a by product of investment?
    • 4/5
      Read it again whenever you think the market is irrational and crazy. They have been much crazier before, and will be again in the future.