The Speculator of Financial Markets: How Financial Innovation and Supervision Made the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Banking and Financial Institutions)

Contents
List of Figures
1 Introduction
	Notes
	Bibliography
2 The Speculator and Financial Innovations: An Old Portrait
	2.1 Introduction
	2.2 Humble Beginnings in Rome
	2.3 The City of God, and the Temple of Jerusalem
	2.4 A Pound of Flesh at the Root of International Finance
	2.5 Monti di Pietà: A Mountain of Piety
	2.6 The Medici Family and the Bill of Exchange
	2.7 A Mountain of Debt, and the Bond Revolution
	2.8 A City of Gold
	2.9 Conclusions
	Notes
	Bibliography
3 The Speculator and Financial Innovations: A New Portrait
	3.1 Introduction
	3.2 Guilds and Chartered Corporations
	3.3 Securities Markets, the VOC, and the First Mutual Fund
	3.4 Modern Finance in London, and the Rise of the Exchange Alley
	3.5 From the Tontine Coffee-House to the New York Stock Exchange
	3.6 American Civil War and Cotton Bonds
	3.7 Art and the Second War World
	3.8 The Rise of Hedge Funds
	3.9 The Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) and the SPAC Mafia
	3.10 Conclusions
	Notes
	Bibliography
4 Uncertainty: The Necessary Unknowable Road to Speculation
	4.1 Introduction
	4.2 Ways of Gambling: From Chance to Skills
	4.3 From Numbers to the Mastery of Risk
	4.4 The Renaissance Period: Towards the Law of Probability
	4.5 Making Probability Mathematical
	4.6 The Nature of Human Beings
	4.7 Pandemics: From the Black Death to Covid-19
	4.8 From the Secret of Felicity to the Chicago School of Economics
	4.9 Game Theory Between Rationality and Passion
	4.10 God Is Dead
	4.11 Uncertainty, Possibility, and Anxiety
	4.12 From Risk-Aversion to Uncertainty-Aversion Paradigms
	4.13 Conclusions
	Notes
	Bibliography
5 Economic Bubbles, Schemes, and Market Failures
	5.1 Introduction
	5.2 Tulip Mania
	5.3 The Battle of Waterloo: War and Finance
	5.4 The Great Sovereign Bond Bust
	5.5 Financial Fiction and Schemes
	5.6 The South Sea and Mississippi Schemes: ‘A Real Beauty and a Panted Whore’
	5.7 The Bull Market of the Roaring Twenties and the Crash of Wall Street
	5.8 From the Ponzi Scheme to Ponzi Schemes
	5.9 Herstatt Bank and Globalisation
	5.10 The Dotcom Bubble
	5.11 Cryptocurrencies and Decentralised Finance
	5.12 Centralised Finance
	5.13 Conclusions
	Notes
	Bibliography
6 Short Selling: The Bears of the Market
	6.1 Introduction
	6.2 The Great Bear of Wall Street
	6.3 From Tea Panic to Boston Tea Party
	6.4 Hamilton, and the Panic of 1792 in the United States
	6.5 The 1907 Knickerbocker Crisis in The Name of Two Brothers
	6.6 Black Wednesday, and the Man Who Broke the Bank of England
	6.7 The Enron Scandal
	6.8 Lehman Brothers, and the ‘Big Short’
	6.9 Terror Trader for a Fistful of Euros
	6.10 GameStop, and the Bad Fate of Short Sellers
	6.11 Conclusions
	Notes
	Bibliography
7 Conclusions
	Notes
Index