[caprese]

The tulip bubble is the worst poster child of asset bubbles and irrational exuberance

But at this point, I don't think it matters. Colloquially, saying 'tulips' gets the point across. People know that you are criticizing the exuberance or volatility of an ephemeral asset. People know what asset price distortion you are comparing it to.

[jbottoms]

The Orchid Bubble (Orchidelirium) was comparable to the tulip bubble. Bulldozers were just digging up tons of Amazon soil and orchid plants and dumping them into ship's holds. Then the ships would lumber home, and have their cargo sorted out in port.

[walshemj]

I think the south sea bubble which even caught Isaac Newton out might be the worst.

[DuskStar]

For some reason a tale of a governmental debt instrument being overvalued isn't quite as popular as one about tulips ;)

The South Sea Company is a remarkable example of people ignoring the fundamentals of a stock in order to speculate, though. Or perhaps a story of people knowing just enough about the fundamentals to get themselves into trouble... (Many comparisons were made to the East India Company, which had a similar trade monopoly, and that comparison made some sense - until you consider the fact that a trade monopoly with land your country owns is much more profitable than one where you're frequently at war with the owners)

[notahacker]

I think the fashion for similarly marketed investments (including the infamous "an undertaking of great advantage but nobody to know what it is") is probably the biggest lesson.

That people in the seventeenth century didn't really understand how to value the fundamentals of a new government trade monopoly is unsurprising and its subsequent overvaluation perhaps not that great an indictment of seventeenth century investors; a more widely applicable lesson is that price movement in this stock spilled over into newfound speculator enthusiasm for absolutely ridiculous ventures and companies pretending to be raising money for one purpose and actually spending it on something else.