A closer look
Dutch citizens in the 1630s went completely feral over tulip bulbs, creating the world's first recorded speculative economic bubble where a single Viceroy tulip bulb was traded for two lasts of wheat, four fat oxen, eight fat swine, twelve fat sheep, two hogsheads of wine, four casks of beer, two tons of butter, a thousand pounds of cheese, a complete bed, a suit of clothes, and a silver drinking cup. The market inevitably crashed in 1637, leaving thousands of people utterly destitute while holding a rotting piece of plant matter. Wall Street bros love to mock this historical catastrophe as proof of primitive financial illiteracy, completely ignoring that they currently trade digital pictures of bored apes for the gross domestic product of a small island nation
