Tulip Trading, from Richard Owen
A documentary on the Yesterday channel just now about the Netherlands had a brief segment on tulip trading. Today tulips are sold by Dutch auction: an odometer graphic winds down marked with price and the first trader to hit his button wins the consignment. Interestingly, a tulip history expert alleged that nobody went bankrupt due to the tulip bubble. She alleged Charles Mackay drew the myth from playful Dutch art painted in the period and it perpetuated from there. The most desirable and expensive tulip in the Dutch bubble was the Semper Augustus. Its flamed appearance is now recognised to be a form of crop disease and so any such flowers in today's fields are immediately ripped out and destroyed.