Reliving Tulip Mania, Dutch tour profits from finance crisis (Feature)

By Thomas Burmeister Oct 23, 2008, 5:08 GMT

Amsterdam - People are getting goose pimples in front of Amsterdam's Nieuwe Kerk (New Church) these days. 'Below us lie victims of the world's first financial crisis,' says tour operator Raoul Serree.

This is the site of the 'Ellendige Kerkhof,' the old graveyard of the 'miserables,' which included people who had died by execution - or by their own hand.

For 17th-century Holland's Tulip Mania, seen as the earliest historical precedent of the current financial crisis, drove a lot of people to suicide.

'We're besieged with enquiries,' relates Serree, living proof of the fact that every crisis has beneficiaries. He says he got the idea from the daily news headlines, and now his 'Crisis Tours on the Trail of Tulip Mania' are a hit.

'Even real bankers come and pay 12 euros to hear how and why the financial system collapsed back then,' Serree says.

Members of an amateur investors club also journeyed from the provinces to the Netherlands' financial capital for a bit of edification.

'The tour gave us some consolation,' remarked one of them, Marjan Loeve. 'A lot of us lost money in stock trading, but we haven't been affected as terribly as the speculators of that era.'

Nearly 400 years have passed since the investor hysteria that came to be known as Tulip Mania.

Shortly before it hit, the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or VOC), whose trade with the Far East had made it the first global concern, also became the first company to issue stock. Its share certificates were affordable to people like craftsmen and bakers.

So the idea that you could get rich by trading shares of stock existed when tulips arrived in Holland from Asia a little while later.

Demand for the flower celebrated by the sultans quickly grew ever stronger in wealthy and prestige-conscious families, and prices for tulip bulbs soared.

Not just harvested bulbs were objects of speculation. By 1636, people even bought shares of bulbs still in the ground, although no one knew if the bulbs would thrive or perhaps be destroyed by frost.

This was the birth of risky, unchecked options trading, as practised in the United States by mortgage speculators of late. In Holland during Tulip Mania, nearly half of all the pubs turned into hectic, alcohol-fueled tulip exchanges in the evening.

By February 1637, the excitement had ballooned to such proportions that sums that could buy entire city villas were being paid for the most coveted bulbs.

'Everybody's infected,' a report said at the time. 'Butchers, gatekeepers, shipbrokers, innkeepers, students, barbers, chimney sweeps, tax collectors, peat cutters - hardly a social stratum is left out.'

Then the bubble burst overnight. At one of the tulip auctions, a number of traders - called 'florists' - lost their appetite for risk. They probably ran out of money as well. The news spread like wildfire.

It suddenly became apparent that there was a surplus of tulip bulbs. Instead of being traded, they were passed out to feed the hungry.

'People who had been millionaires a short while ago swelled soup kitchen lines colossally,' Serree says at his tour's end point, the De Keuken restaurant. This is where good Samaritans once fed the poor and the impoverished, and where bankers like to lunch today.