Bubble Sea

The book is an economic history of the South Sea Bubble. It combines economic theory and quantitative analysis with historical evidence in order to provide a rounded account. It brings together scholarship from a variety of different fields to update the existing historical work on the Bubble. Up until now, economic history research has not been integrated into mainstream histories of 1720. Technical work on share prices and ledgers has been inaccessible to a wider audience. As well as providing new evidence against the gambling mania argument, the book also interprets the existing economic history scholarship for non-specialists.

Seminar paper from the year 2022 in the subject Economics - Finance, grade: 1,3, University of Münster, language: English, abstract: This paper analyses how far the events of 1720 actually constituted a bubble. While there is an ongoing discussion of what a "bubble" actually is, this study will sidestep much of the formal discussion and focus more on presenting stylised facts that any theory would need to be able to explain. Consequently, this paper will follow Quinn and Turner (2020) in defining a "bubble" as having two parts: a period of sharply increasing prices followed by a period of sharply decreasing prices. This definition has the advantage of not hinging on the cause of the bubble itself but focusing on the actual price developments (more on that later). While these price increases may carry the innuendo of not being justified by “fundamentals”, the definition does not explicitly require this. From the first international collapse of financial markets in the early 18th century to the more recent Great Financial Crisis, financial bubbles have been the source of massive economic gains as well as losses and bear an unrivalled potential to disrupt real economic activity. Consequently, they are often controversially discussed – both in the general public, as well as in academic literature. With every new supposed bubble episode, comparisons to past crises are drawn. While much of their original context got lost to the history books, a sense of awe regarding the madness that the participants seem to have suffered from remains. Even after 300 years, the events surrounding the South Sea Bubble of 1720 are still part of a controversial debate about the very nature of financial markets and the investors participating in them. As pointed out by Paul (2011), the South Sea Bubble "has become a byword for folly and fraud" and a landmark in the economic history of Europe. A company that survived for over one and a half centuries is today mostly remembered for what happened to it in less than a year. As one of the most famous crashes in history, its name is often invoked in debates of more recent bubbles – often with little understanding of the actual events.

The Acoustic Bubble describes the interaction of acoustic fields with bubbles in liquid. The book consists of five chapters. Chapter 1 provides a basic introduction to acoustics, including some of the more esoteric phenomena that can be seen when high-frequency high-intensity underwater sound is employed. Chapter 2 discusses the nucleation of cavitation and basic fluid dynamics, while Chapter 3 draws together the acoustics and bubble dynamics to discuss the free oscillation of a bubble and acoustic emissions from such activity. The acoustic probes that are often applied to study the behavior of a bubble when an externally-applied acoustic field drives it into oscillation is deliberated in Chapter 4. The last chapter outlines a variety of effects associated with acoustically-induced bubble activity. The bubble detection, sonoluminescence, sonochemistry, and pulse enhancement are also covered. This publication is a good reference for physics and engineering students and researchers intending to acquire knowledge of the acoustic interactions of acoustic fields with bubbles.

The presence of speculative bubbles in capital markets (an important area of interest in financial history) is widely accepted across many circles. Talk of them is pervasive in the media and especially in the popular financial press. Bubbles are thought to be found primarily in the stock market, which is our main interest, although bubbles are said to occur in other markets. Bubbles go hand in hand with the notion that markets can be irrational. The academic community has a great interest in bubbles, and it has produced scholarly literature that is voluminous. For some economists, doing bubble research is like joining the vanguard of a Kuhnian paradigm shift in economic thinking. Not so fast. If bubbles did exist, they would pose a serious challenge to neoclassical finance. Bubbles would contradict the ideas that markets are rational or work in an informationally efficient manner. That’s what makes the topic of bubbles interesting. This book reviews and evaluates the academic literature as well as some popular investment books on the possible existence of speculative bubbles in the stock market. The main question is whether there is convincing empirical evidence that bubbles exist. A second question is whether the theoretical concepts that have been advanced for bubbles make them plausible. The reader will discover that I am skeptical that bubbles actually exist. But I do not think I or anyone else will ever be able to conclusively prove that there has never been a bubble. From studying the literature and from reading history, I find that many famous purported bubbles reflect inaccurate history or mistakes in analysis or simply cannot be shown to have existed. In other instances, bubbles might have existed. But in each of those cases, there are credible rational explanations. And good evidence exists for the idea that even if bubbles do exist, they are not of great importance to understanding the stock market.