#''south sea bubble'' by extra history on youtube

[dwagom]

as speculative bubbles inflate they create haves (those who'd gotten in early) and have-nots (who'd gotten in late or not at all), and the more they grow the wider and deeper that rift gets. the BoJ at least had the guts to pop the RE/land bubble in the 1990s to protect japanese society which was creaking under the weight of elevated RE prices. the first takeaway is that if an administration has a large speculative bubble form on their watch, then it's either cornered, incompetent, cowardly, or corrupt (and let's face it, the japanese government should've acted sooner); the second is that the 1980s bubble economy and the lost decades that followed are in fact the same economic post-plaza accords situation differing only in the presence of an asset bubble, which i assume was allowed to inflate to hide the catastrophic implications of Plaza from the electorate for as much time as it was possible to buy with mountains of bezzle; the third is that a crisis of this sort can be resolved most fairly by inflating wages, but that requires a ruling class willing to let go of a significant fraction of its political power, not because political power translates into purchasing power (it inherently does, even if it's perceived to be immoral when it happens), but because purchasing power translates into political power, which is to say that economic crises are lists of contradicting demands toward preserving the extant configuration of power relations ("status quo") at costs rising because of those contradictions. should the attempt to steer the situation between emergent dysfunction and the enforcement of novel inequality that it arises from fail (in the sense that it can not impose or at least confabulate promises of durable equilibria of governance), a more serious feedback loop begins to form. of note is that both the mississippi and the south sea bubbles were artificially inflated by the french and the british governments to deal with complete economic shitshows by means of bezzle serving as a psychological tool

[petermorwood]

I’m subscribed to Extra History (”always have a plan...”) over on YouTube. Highly recommended as a quick-reference source for all sorts of people, times and places.

That quote, from the series on Bismarck (”Bismarck had a plan; Bismarck ALWAYS had a plan!”) is an example of how their witty presentations can stick in the mind, even one as cluttered with irrelevancies as mine.

Watch the ones on the First Crusade - ”Why let (insert sensible behaviour here) get in the way of a good Crusade?” - and The South Sea Bubble - ”It was Walpole...” - for more ear-worm-like examples. :->

They also do a series called “So You Haven’t Read...”, and that screencap is from one I caught just the other day: “SYHR: The Sandman”.

@neil-gaiman, have you seen it? :-D

[andmaybegayer]

I know about the Dutch Tulip craze, but what were the rest?

The South Sea Company Bubble

is a messy one that involves a lot of Stonks and Econony, and if you want a really well researched but digestible video summary I would recommend the Extra History series on it. Really I highly recommend Extra History if you want an easy way to get a shallow but not dumbed-down introduction to a wide swathe of history.

Brief Summary: In theory, the South Sea Trading Company was a private trading company that would operate in the South Sea, which is basically the ports of South America. This was because the English government at the time was flat broke, so they intended to raise money by selling shares in the SSTC to their creditors in exchange for the debt they held. This consolidates the debt in the SSTC, allowing it to be paid at a much lower interest rate and on more favourable terms. The SSTC then makes money by trading and pays out dividends to the people who traded in government debt for shares. Because the stock the SSTC issues is theoretically equal to the debt of the government, this means everyone is happy and it all balances out.

There was just one problem: There was absolutely no way for the SSTC to actually do trade in the South Sea. All those ports were Spanish controlled, because of all the colonialism Spain did to South America. And Britain was at war with Spain, because, of course they were. Britain was at war with everyone. Using some political chicanery, they managed to end the war with Spain, but as a result of said chicanery, they got a terrible deal on trade to the South Sea. One ship per year per port (also they were exclusively trading slaves. Oops, I guess!) which is, of course, nowhere near enough to pay back the shareholders.

Ever more ongoing insane economic jockeying in an attempt to keep this company afloat long enough to pay off the English debt resulted in it basically being supported by the government that was supposed to be paying it, and its stock price rose dramatically. The value of SSTC stocks now exceeds the value of the debt being traded in for it, so now shares can be sold at market rates to anyone. Said jockeying involved consolidating even more government debt into the company and also putting members of the Royal Family on the company board, which eventually put The Fucking King, Yes The King on the board. So you can imagine, when The King, That Guy, owns a company in the 1700′s, you definitely want to put money in there! I mean, what could go wrong! The King literally cannot fail, he’s too powerful!

This basically continues, ever more hare-brained schemes are made up to keep the share price climbing because as said before, there’s no actual money in the South Seas, the only thing keeping this place afloat is selling stonks. Eventually the schemes got too hare-brained: selling stocks at ludicrously inflated prices but with loan and buy-now-pay-later deals that would make a we-finance-used-car-salesman cringe. The stock price collapsed almost tenfold in a single week, and kept going, resulting in colossal losses for share buyers, especially those who had taken out loans to get in on the action, loans which in many circumstances were actually offered BY THE SOUTH SEA COMPANY.

I’m not 100% on this statement but I believe this was one of the earliest share-based bubbles, rather than a commodity bubble like the Tulip Mania.

The Paris Stock Exchange Optical Telegraph Scam

is a particularly niche one, in that as far as I’m aware the only authoritative English language document on it is literally this YouTube Video by Tom Scott, where he paid a translator to go over the original French documents, which can be found here. The summary is: there were optical signalling towers across France that were used to transmit information very quickly, by signalling with oversized mechanical semaphore flags with rules for relaying information, and they were only for official government use.

In the 1830′s a pair of brothers in Bordeaux paid off some operators to transmit information about the movements of the Paris stock exchange, and made some smart decisions to make sure that the information they sent was not recorded by marking it as a mistake. The rest of Bordeaux would only get this information by messenger on horse, so few other steps later, the brothers had information about movements of the Paris stock exchange before anyone else, and they made bank by making what appeared to be shrewd investments.

This is notable for being very similar to how modern high-frequency trading companies will base their offices as close to where offshore fibre lines make landfall as possible and communicate with lightspeed microwave beams to ensure they have the most up to date information they can get.

The Cash for Ash scandal

was a perfect example of Perverse Incentives: The Northern Irish government wanted to push a renewable energy target, namely the use of wood pellets instead of coal or gas for heating, by offering to subsidise the cost of running a wood-pellet fired heating system. The fault was that they were paying at equal or more than the cost of burners, boilers and fuel in incentives, so in practice it wasn’t a subsidy, it was straight up paying people to run heaters. Several groups who owned buildings or land saw this and started running as many wood-pellet fired furnaces as they could get into a site, heating empty buildings and offices because they were making a profit on it, hence “cash for ash”.

[queerasfact]

Alright so my Walpole story comes from the fact that this YouTube channel called extra credits, in their extra history videos did a series on the south sea bubble (it's wild). Robert Walpole, Horace Walpole's uncle became really popular with the fans because of his role in it (and the catchphrase "it was walpole"). Now Walpole has visual cameos in every series and the lies video (mistakes, simplication weirdness, source discussion, and stories they couldn't include) (1)

(2) always contains a story about some member Walpole family that is somehow connected to the topic. So I got really excited when I saw the name Horace Walpole in the backlog of your podcast. Extra History also did a stand alone video on Julie DAubingy. The episode also had analysis why the French Court was turning a bit more of a blind eye to same gender love than the rest of Europe at the time that wasn't in your podcast ep, so I thought you might like to watch it.

Hahaha thank you for your explanation! I’ll definitely check out the channel.

-Alice

[antialiasis]

So for a long time I’ve been meaning to recommend this YouTube series, Extra History. It’s basically a really accessible, fascinating, and often hilarious series of miniseries about various historical events and people, ranging from the well-known to the obscure, illustrated with cartoons. I’m not much of a history geek myself, but they make even topics that sound boring really entertaining. And after each series (well, almost all of them; the first series and some of the brief miniseries they’ve done don’t have it), they do a “Lies” episode where the writer talks about to what they had to simplify, what might be apocryphal, where the historical sources may differ, and providing interesting/amusing extra context that didn’t make it into the episodes.

My personal favorite series are these two, but they’re all good:

The South Sea Bubble - Economic shenanigans in the early eighteenth century! I know how that sounds, but this series is hilarious and fascinating and a great example of history being wild (while oddly reminiscent of more recent history, ahem).

The Broad Street Pump - The true detective story of how John Snow (not that one) founded epidemiology while trying to root out the cause of cholera. (Unsanitary content warning on this one - the drawings are tasteful and very cartoony as always, but there’s extensive discussion of the symptoms of cholera and how it spread, so if you’re very sensitive to that sort of thing, maybe this one’s not for you. It’s super-interesting, though! And an important component in the history of how we actually got modern sanitation.)

I also recommend Extra Credits, the channel Extra History is on, in general. Funnily enough, normally they talk about video games - everything from game design and narratives to the game industry. They’re always great and insightful and really interesting. And the illustrations are very cute.

[evilelitest2]

100 Days of Trump Day 36: Extra History/Extra Credits

This is an odd one but important to understanding the circumstances that leadthis political situation, and for that purpose I am recommending a video game youtube channel who also do cartoon history lessons.  And here is why. 

Extra Credits primarily focuses upon talking about game design and how to make games work.  Its a lot of fun and I enjoy it (even if I do they are too easily impressed at times) but they also do a spin off show where they talk about cool periods in history.  Short, funny, and extremely informative, I can’t think of better people to explains some of the major issues that made this situation possible.  I am going to recommend 5 shows they have, so even if you aren’t interested in checking out the rest of their stuff, you need to watch these 5 series to understand WTF is going on in America right now.  Cause there is precedent for pretty much everything that happened last year, nothing here was unprecedented 

Firstly, and above all most importantly, their 5 part series on the South Sea Bubble, because if you want to understand the economic situation in America, check this out.  It talks about how in the 1700s the South Sea Trading company, despite never making any money off actual trading, was able to use the stock market to become more valuable than the entire economy of Great Britain.  LIke, you heard me right, this single company had an economic worth larger than the country in which it was station despite not making any actual money.  And instead of like...investigating that because its obviously fraud, most of the political leaders rushed to buy into it Enron style, because they wanted in on the scheme that was promising to make them money.  Actually investigating it and seeing “wait, this is in no way sustainable” would have required actual risk and possibly cost them money, so everybody in power shut their eyes and pretended everything was ok.  Because of course it can’t be fraud, look how well it’s shares are doing, that means it is doing great right?  And when the bubble did burst, the economy crashed but the people responsible got off mostly scot free.  

Oh and the person responsible for taking the banks to task was still tied to them and let most of them off.  Which is exactly why we need economic regulations and why Austrian economics do not work, because individuals aren’t capable of investigating this stuff once a buying frenzy kicks in.  The fact that this 1700 scandal resembles the 2008 crash necessitates that you check this video out, because holy crap it really helps you understand the problems with unregulated Wall Street spending.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Now I could just recommend this and nothing else, because this is the main video series that really must be watched to understand Trump, but since you are hear anyways, lets check out some other video series they have done which can spread light on WTF is wrong with the American system

   Here they examine the United States government structure as if it were a gaming system, with incentives and power balance included and how for the political elites, it just doesn’t make sense to look out for the country’s interests vs their own.

Part 2 corporate money in politics , Part 3 Gerrymandering, Part 4 How you can get Politicians to listen to you

  Next, we have their great summery of the dangers of an unfree internet and why we need to protect internet freedom, which BTW, Trump is threatening to take away right now.  Also includes shit on American Copyright Law 

CopyRight Law, SOPA and PIPA, and two parts on internet security 

   Then we have theirseries on the Graachi Brothers and the Fall of the Roman Republic....remind anybody of anything?  Because when most of your population is in a state of constant rage, Democracies can’t last.

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, and the Prequel   Seriously, this resembles modern day America so much it is kinda horrifying.  

   And finally, their extremely chilling series on the start of WWI, and why it is absolutely critical to have our political leaders understand the value of resisting the call to war, because once they start, it gets out of hand real fast.  

Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 

  Also considering how much overlap there is between the Gamergate community and Trump supporters, their series on propaganda games is really useful.  You can find it here, here, and here

  All of these episodes I linked are necessary to understanding Trump, and how when we look at existing systems or past events we can see the precedent to his rise to power.  

If you want to check out the rest of their work, Extra History is here, and Extra Credits proper here 

[alfredomova]

Liked on YouTube: England: South Sea Bubble - The Bubble Pops - Extra History - #4 https://youtu.be/SIlnsP6AjP8

[brycerecommends]

Extra Credits/Extra History

I’ve been watching Extra Credits since nearly the beginning.  It’s a Youtube channel primarily about video games, and if that isn’t your thing you could skip down below to when I start talking about Extra History, a set of videos on the same channel just about history.

Extra Credits has a primary focus on improving video games by talking about what it means to be better, not just in gameplay, but in social impact, how subject matter is treated, and industry practices.  The goal of the whole channel is make game be more interesting and thoughtful.

The structure uses a series of still images, most of which are cartoon representations of the creators, but also screenshots from video games, internet memes, etc. all played over pre-scripted narration.  The narration is written by James Portnow, a game design consultant, and read by animator Daniel Floyd.  He speeds up his voice, which some people find grating, but I think it’s fine. The videos are each around 6 minutes long

Extra History

Once a week (for the most part) they release a video in their Extra History series.  The videos are chosen by their Patreon backers from a short list they present (I’m one of them) and they make about four or five videos on each topic, each in a very similar style to Extra Credits.  

They mostly don’t do much classical history, though the very first one was on the Punic Wars, and they did another on the Articles of Confederation.  Many of them are about specific, often overlooked people (at least overlooked in the US) such as Mary Seacole and Sueliman the Magnificent. But there are others, such as the ones about Early Christian Schisms, the Warring States period of Japan, or most recently the Collapse of the Bronze age.  

My absolute favorite one is about economics.  Specifically the South Sea Company Bubble, where almost all of the wealth of England went into the stock price of a company that would never make any money and ultimately lead to the rise in power of England’s first prime minister.

I love this channel and everything it does, so check it out!

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCODtTcd5M1JavPCOr_Uydg

[alfredomova]

Liked on YouTube: England: South Sea Bubble - Buying Out Britain - Extra History - #3 https://youtu.be/1vcF5rebN20

[alfredomova]

Liked on YouTube: England: South Sea Bubble - Too Big to Fail - Extra History - #2 https://youtu.be/Fsk6oZm1EEA

[alfredomova]

Liked on YouTube: England: South Sea Bubble - The Sharp Mind of John Blunt - Extra History - #1 https://youtu.be/k1kndKWJKB8