Devil Take the Hindmost

<b>A lively original and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day.</b> <p/><i>Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed--and not changed--over the last five hundred years? </i> <p/>In <i>Devil Take the Hindmost</i> 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 to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720 which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies but not the madness of people. <p/>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. <p/>From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929 from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era <i>Devil Take the Hindmost</i> tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.