December 31, 2024 • 33 mins
All of the fun of gambling without any of the boring math!
'Devil Take The Hindmost' by Edward Chancellor is a series of snapshots across history of financial speculation (so called bubbles). Presents not only the instances of craziness but also the feeling of the time (notable periods being The Tulip Mania, South Sea Bubble and The Gilded Age amongst others). Not super heavy on statistics; more so newspaper articles, quotes from notable people and behavioural reactions of the people. Chapters are broken into individual time periods and you won't see any charts or graphs either.
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Timeline:
(00:00:00) Intro
(00:03:09) Themes/Questions
(00:22:23) Author & Extras
(00:27:11) Summary
(00:29:59) Value 4 Value
(00:30:51) Join Live!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Kyrin Down (00:00):
All of the fun of gambling without any of the boring math.
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the mere mortals book reviews in the new year,
2025.
Happy new year. I hope you had a very merry Christmas
(00:20):
at that as well. I am indeed recording here live on the 1st January 2025.
And what better way to welcome in the new year than for me to
reveal to you my inner degenerate gambler?
Okay. No. I'm not gonna do that. I do have one, but we're we're not gonna reveal that today. We will be talking about some other degenerate gamblers in this book here, though. Devil Take the Hindmost, a history of financial speculation
(00:46):
by Edward Chancellor.
So this book was published in 1999,
400 pages in length, and probably talking about 8 hours reading.
It's all notes in here. It's just notes. You'd think maybe something related to financial speculation would have a lot of graphs and numbers and statistics, but no. You're not actually gonna find that in here. What you're actually gonna find is a series of series of snapshots across history of financial speculation, so called bubbles.
(01:14):
So
this presents not only the instances of craziness, but also
the feeling of the time, how they arose, what the interaction between
governments and people, technologies of the time, all relating to these bubbles, which will be the things like the tulip mania
in
Holland in the I think that was 1500 to 1600 period somewhere in there, of the Gilded Age in America, which was the 1800. Think of Mark Twain era
(01:44):
of things like the Japanese financial bubble
in the late in, late 1980
period.
What else do we have? The,
South Sea bubble, which was
related to England
in the
17, 8 100 period. You got you're already thinking like, Karen, why are you struggling with this? It's because there's so many of these damn bubbles that picked up in this book. It is wild how many
(02:10):
were actually in here across history.
So
it's not as a mentioned, not super heavy on statistics.
So
you're not gonna see
actual numbers of the it rose this percentage fell by this percentage other than than some very basic ones.
No graphs, no tables, no anything like that. This is more related to the feeling, I guess.
(02:34):
I found it quite in-depth in terms of the structure of how it was set out.
And we do have 9 chapters here
with titles such as stop stop jobbing in change alley, the projecting
age of the 16 nineties, the never to be forgot or forgiven South Sea scheme, fool's gold, the emerging market of the 18 twenties.
(02:54):
You know, cowboy capitalism from Bretton Woods to Michael Milken.
There's many of these agents that he captures in here. I guess 8
of them in total,
is is what I would say just from these chapters.
So it's pretty extensive.
Let's jump on to some of the themes and questions,
which will reveal some interesting stuff that has happened throughout the throughout the ages of financial speculation.
(03:18):
What I want to focus on here is a couple of different questions that arise, I think, from this book.
One, which is do financial bubbles occur throughout history?
Yes. This one definitely proves that. What is their structure? Why do they occur? Can they be stopped? Are they good, bad, neutral phenomena? Let's dive into some of these questions, which I think this book really answers for us. So what's unquestionable is that financial bubbles occur that's
(03:45):
put to bed put to rest, these things definitely do happen.
So they typically, and this is my own
kind of reading between the lines of similarities
of what occurred in these,
because he doesn't
lay it out in a step by step structure of, like, step 1,
step 2, step 3, step 4. This is more what I've taken from
(04:06):
reading of all of these financial bubbles and going like, okay, there seem to be some similarities. So
typically in an an economy that is doing well due to increased productivity,
AKA during the Dutch Golden Age, so think of the Dutch East India
or Dutch West India
Trading Companies, these
places where they were just
(04:27):
raking in ridiculous profits. I think they're the most profitable companies
in history and had the largest
financial capitalizations
due to their trading of the of spices and things like that. And I've done some book reviews on on these spice wars and things like this before.
The tulip mania occurred during then. So that was when the tulip prices of bulbs got up to ridiculous levels.
(04:52):
We have a new financial market or innovations emerge. So this would be the things of inventions of brokers, stock exchanges,
derivatives, leverage.
And this is common across all of the ages.
Easy for retail to access, so this being, you know, just
financial participants
such as myself or the average layperson.
(05:15):
So this is where you'll see coffee houses were proliferating
in the England bubbles just in general. This was a pretty common place for retail people to come in and be able to get in. We have information
dissemination, so radio during the American roaring twenties, for example.
And with a government
without much regulation
or perhaps too much regulation, too much meddling, or an inability to enforce their laws, which they're trying to regulate and meddle in. And we see this with the Japanese government and officials
(05:46):
playing with the currency and the laws,
to encourage investment only in Japan during the 19 eighties, a Japanese bubble. So
all of this is,
I I kind of broke it into 4 stages. You have the kind of formation when times are good, people have extra cash to play around. And so they go in, like, I'm gonna financially speculate,
(06:06):
AKA gamble, AKA invest. There's a very
thin line between these three words.
We then see these these bubbles start to form and they get stronger and there's these self feedback loops of people making more money and they're starting to create these,
very interesting mechanisms for for how these bubbles start to go. We get to this crazy mania stage where it's like everyone's making bank
(06:32):
money hand over fist. Everyone's loving life.
It then pops and we have the aftermath of usually pretty big drawdowns of
50 to 80%
seem to be around the rough rages that that these
bubbles
burst down to. So
why do they occur? Well, it starts with a question, I guess, about investment,
(06:53):
speculation, and gambling.
We have
some funny little definitions right at the start here to try and
distinguish between these. I'll read out a tiny little quote here, which you can find in the preface
on page
x I, sort of page 9 in the preface.
Similar definite problems of definition are encountered in distinguishing speculation from gambling. While a bad investment may be a speculation, a poorly executed speculation is often described as a gamble.
(07:22):
And then the psychology to speculation and gambling are almost indistinguishable.
Both are dangerously addictive habits, which involve an appeal to fortune, are often accompanied by delusional behavior and are dependent for success on the control of emotions.
So there's a kind of multitude of factors that I think played in with it.
You know, what is an investment versus gambling,
(07:45):
I think goes into things like how much research effort went into something, the time period of holding it, the range of expected returns, the structural setup of the market, etcetera.
Ultimately, it's rooted in consciousness. We're we're conscious human beings. Therefore, we act on self interest,
and a lot of this is evolutionary
(08:06):
in nature.
And therefore, the, you
know,
human self independence decision making,
is also getting mixed in with our, you know, our desire to do better, to to have more, to accumulate status and wealth and things like this.
Tempered with that we are humans and we have a lot of emotional mixes. So you've got these
(08:28):
two forces,
1 self interest and then 2, you know, regular human emotions
playing together
and interacting in markets. So there is something called the efficient market hypothesis. And this is all getting to this question. Why do these things occur? Well, we have markets. We're bartering. I think that's undeniable that that stuff happens. You can never stamp that out. And children will barter with sticks on a playground, for example, and stones and random stuff. So this is innate in our in our nature.
(09:00):
What
the efficient market hypothesis, and this is from some economic economists
postulate, which is that,
let me get this exactly right,
that the all asset replaces
reflect all available data.
Now we can quibble on definitions, but essentially, this is saying that
(09:21):
the price of something is always what it should be priced at. So even if it jumps from $10 to $100 within a day,
that is reflecting all the available data that is on this
asset. And that that $100
price is the kind of fair value
of the the, you know, the efficient market hypothesis efficiently. We're marketing this this
(09:43):
price increase because more productivity is gonna come, etcetera, etcetera,
going on from that.
Now I think this is kind of retarded to be to be honest.
Once again, you can quibble on definitions,
with related to some of these things. But, you know, is it irrational greed or rational people making poor analysis
(10:03):
when prices go to these ridiculous levels, and then they go up, and then they go down,
rather rapidly.
I take the
one of my favorite memes is the, the risk I took was calculated, but man,
am I bad at math?
And I think that that sums up a lot of this really, really nicely, which is, yeah, sure. There's,
(10:25):
you could say that the the market is efficient and that prices, you know, people get into the price they deserve and that the prices are just reflective of what people want.
But I think people are irrational, and therefore, the markets
become irrational as well. So I on that side of things.
The adjectives to describe speculators
(10:46):
are things like frenzied, mad, wild, exuberant, plague stricken, walking ghosts,
if things go wrong.
And I think that you can describe market prices when they go into these bubble periods as
the prices exhibit
similarly
chaotic behavior,
non reflective of the underlying
(11:06):
asset, which they are
speculating on.
So I think that's that's personal opinion there. What I gained from this book, can they be stopped?
I don't think you can stamp out human emotions.
We
have a lot of bots trading in markets nowadays for example.
I don't think that
(11:27):
stops human emotions
filtering into
the bots trading, for example, I think there's still implicit
assumptions and still, there's ultimately still humans behind it. And they can turn it off and you know, sell to sell buy buy buy hold, you know, whatever it is. I think those still happen in in financial markets in these bubbles. I'm talking about just these particular bubbles, not the markets as a whole over a,
(11:52):
you know, 50 year time period or a rolling average of a decade or anything like that. Just talking about these specific instances in time.
So
I don't think you can stamp out investing
speculation
slash gambling because they are on the spectrum.
Most people if you had to ask them,
you know, is investment actually, I'm jumping forward.
(12:15):
I'll leave that for a second.
I don't think you can stamp it out. They are the same thing. You know, even though governments throw some half assed or perhaps even full assed rules
at people, regulations,
laws,
They either get around them or they flaunt them,
despite the the government, and they can't enforce them.
There's
(12:36):
people just do it in a different name. It didn't talk much about this in the book, but many governments and ideologies over time have tried to stamp out
financial speculation and markets and to control markets.
Let's think particularly of the USSR, which had the, you know, the central control. We're going to control prices,
which will stop
(12:57):
the the bourgeoisie
from exploiting the the peasants and things like this. And in the end, black markets just emerged. And
you have these just ridiculous
untruths or distorted realities where the government says it's this thing, but in reality it's it's this price or it's this thing. And they just don't match. You can't you can't control these things. So
(13:21):
that's an extreme case. But you also have things like tariffs, import export bans.
So the
the different types of bubbles, the thing that makes me think that they can't be stopped is
these different bubbles have occurred over
one various different time periods in history. This book only goes back to the 1500 where we have decent data on this, but you can bet your ass this was happening in ancient Egypt.
(13:47):
That occurred in different periods of time
under different financial conditions, under different governments,
trying to control
them in various ways or not control them in various ways.
And
I just don't think they can be stopped. There was this great point in the book where
it gives them a quote from an economic Yale professor,
(14:09):
an economist
that thought that the pro prohibition. So this was the,
clamping down of alcohol, particularly, I believe, was the 19 twenties
in,
in America or maybe it was
1910s.
I don't know that period exactly well. He thought that prohibition would make the country more productive because you'd have less people drinking
(14:32):
and
that this would therefore make the country more productive.
Ultimately, what happens, you know,
crime families arose.
People spent all their time trying to
find ways to find alcohol instead of actually working.
And so, you know, that's not that has never stopped anyone.
Let's, let's leave it at that. I don't think these things can be stopped. Is this good, bad or neutral? You know,
(14:57):
once again, it depends on the definition. If you asked, I think the average person on the spit on the street is investing your money a good thing? They'd probably say, Yeah, If you ask them, is gambling your money a good thing? They'd probably say no. And then is speculating a good or bad thing? You know, maybe they'd say in the middle. That's that's, you know, because speculation is just kind of
(15:17):
a riskier form of of investment
or a safer form of gambling.
So so I think
it just depends on on your point of view. If you're asking
with regards to those 3, this book is on financial speculation. So you're probably going to get this right down the middle of the road
(15:37):
opinion,
on whether it's good or bad.
I view them more as a force of nature. They're impartial and unstoppable, the these these bubbles. So
and financial speculation arising from that, I don't think you can control the people. So you're going to have these financial bubbles popping up. The question is,
is this
(15:57):
a harmful deleterious
to the
the the market slash the country slash the world as a whole?
I think I our actions can exacerbate
the kind of energy or destructiveness
or perhaps productivity that this energy
is is creating this financial speculation is,
(16:18):
to
channel it to productive or destructive purposes. So
compare the hurricane,
hurricane Katrina effects
in New Orleans
to the aftermath of the global financial crisis in in 2008, for example. So
in both of these cases is where you had a small amount of people,
(16:39):
corrupt
and slash or incompetent,
which had a huge effect on larger markets and larger people ultimately causing a lot of normal people suffering
because of their actions. This in particular being that the the the flood,
I think it was like the floodgates or the
(16:59):
flood protections for typhoons, hurricanes, things like that were inadequate in in New Orleans. And this was due to, I believe, government
and people, corruption slash incompetence. And they knew that these these levies weren't going to hold well. And this ended up flooding and then, you know, causing a lot of people suffering. Same thing with the GFC.
(17:21):
People were messing around with money, other people's money in banks using,
CDCs
collateral
debt,
CDOs,
collateral collateral debt obligations. I believe they were
essentially levering up,
you know, giving money out to to people who probably shouldn't have money so that they could make more money. And this
(17:44):
eventually spread to the wider market so that even though here in Australia,
I don't know if we had these particular things going on in our economy. I don't believe so.
The US was able to affect us. Obviously, that's a very bad thing. But you could use similar examples and go, okay. But are there ways of channeling the natural forces of
of,
(18:04):
let's say, a volcano
then make a or a dam and of a waterfall to make a hydro,
a hydroelectric power plant and channel that energy into good use? Can these financial markets also have a similar thing where
that energy is being put into good use and that
people who, for example, were perhaps
(18:24):
on the lower end of the financial spectrum were able to make a lot of money quickly,
get out of it, and then their lives are now better from that. You know, there's
there's there's questions to be raised, I think, from this and that I don't think the book
there's one kind of little critique of the book. I don't think it's
really gets into too much in the aftermath
(18:45):
of what exactly happened in the periods after this.
Did this how much suffering did these financial bubbles cause to people? Because there were certainly winners and losers from these. There was people who,
were
financially poor and then,
you know, made a better life for themselves. There are people who are rich and lost a whole bottom bunch of money. Usually, a lot of people would would say the the Gini coefficient of having these large
(19:13):
scale differences in between the the haves and the have nots in society.
If it gets too big, that's bad.
And so bringing it down to a more natural level, these financial bubbles, do they do that?
It's hard to know. That's that's something I'd really like to have known. So
one thing this book has changed and altered my opinion of is the free markets. And I used to be
(19:38):
of the opinion that the free market's a good thing. This is what you want. The,
it's it's a kind of unilateral
good.
Every time that free markets are distorted is when you have the human suffering and the
unrealities
of things that you'll see like in this in the Soviet Union
(19:58):
or
just very distorted markets, which
it's like getting away from the truth of the world.
It's kind of all to my opinion in that it's much like that
quote that's always
given to Winston Churchill.
Everyone gives quotes to Winston Churchill. So I don't know how much to believe of that nowadays or not, but that's,
(20:18):
democracy is not the best form of government. It's simply the the least worst.
And I'm I'm slightly
sliding towards the viewer. At least it's opened my mind to the possibility that the same thing could be said of free markets
because
and that a free market is simply the least worst form of having a market
(20:39):
because
the
regulations and things like that, I don't think they work. I think they ended up cause more suffering to humans and,
and financial repression, coercion, things like that. Yet the amount of
bribery, fraud, corruption, backstabbing, lying and manipulation
across all of these free markets,
(21:00):
financial bubbles is off chops. The amount of bullshit that you just see people doing in this book
was wild.
It just just as staggering.
And I would describe these financial bubbles as,
you know, this is where you could argue, okay, but the the government was or
other people
(21:20):
government in particular was fucking around with the money. They were doing things that forced people to financially speculate. And I think there is a case for that. So you could say that the
the
the cause of these financial bubbles is
not a free market. And so therefore these things happen.
(21:43):
I don't know this is getting into like second, third order effects.
If you have a free market, shouldn't that then correct the
imbalances that you see from non free markets? I don't know. All I'm saying is that
I can't view them as universally good as I as I once thought.
Because the evidence in this book, the it doesn't really align with that.
(22:06):
So humans are mostly good,
but there's still enough shit ones and circumstances
exist
that will make or force
or tempt normal people to do some dodgy shit is is, all I can say on that. So
very, very interesting in that regard. Let's jump on to the author, perhaps some extra details.
The author, Edward Chancellor, was born in 1962,
(22:28):
financial journalist, historian,
worked in banks. I believe he's English.
Not much extra on him to talk about, but so much extra that I couldn't fit into this book review. So
I took
extensive notes,
a ridiculous amount of notes.
And I will be doing another
(22:49):
side piece to this whole book on financial speculation.
I'm not gonna be doing it on this channel like Juan does with his extra learnings.
I'm gonna be putting it on the main mere mortals channel. Two reasons for this.
One is we've got a gap coming up in that, episode in our normal recording where one's gonna be away. So I will do a solo sode. So I think there's a perfect opportunity for that. And then the second is I want to expand it out, pass the book, and make some predictions for a the next financial bubble that I think is gonna happen related particularly to crypto in 2025,
(23:25):
I I e, this year,
in particular, the banana zone,
which is a shirt I am wearing right now,
which captures this idea that there's gonna be a bubble and it's gonna be pretty wild. So
look out for that on the MIMO models channel in probably about 2 to 3 weeks time.
I will try to include a link down below if I remember
(23:46):
in in 3 weeks time.
Another thing that I just wanted to add on this book was it's just such a strange ending to the book. So the ending in particular
was kind of the conclusion. So,
epilogue, the case of the rogue economists,
and it's
20, 23 pages long.
It was a bit baffling to me. I didn't understand
(24:10):
because I found the book relatively neutral. I thought he just presented really nice facts.
It was engaging interesting, but
the ending of this was I think where he chucked in a lot of his
opinions, which is fine.
You know, it's his book. He can do what I have, whatever the hell he wants. I just found it baffling. So for example, it talks about long term capital management
(24:34):
right at the end here, which is a hedge fund which
existed, I think, in the 19 nineties.
They had, you know, these
quants Nobel laureates, I believe the the Myron Scholes equation,
which was to do with pricing of markets and things like this.
And they ended up basically just levering levering up like crazy, you
(24:57):
know, 100 x leverage on,
on their capital,
and blowing up because they weren't as smart as they thought they were.
This was it. And then he was using this as an example of saying like, this is why we need governments to regulate
and to stop things like this, to
(25:18):
not let these financial bubbles get out of control because this is what people do with them. They're, you know, they
create if they're not fraudulent, then they're idiots and they fuck it up for everyone else.
This just seemed really out of place for me because from what I understood, this was a non speculative
hedge fund.
They tried to make money off of essentially arbitrage
(25:42):
and big bets on very unrisky things, but
their their risk management didn't capture
individual tiny little events, and they missed out on this kind of black swan things that could happen.
And I thought it was the darling of the ivory tower because it had all of these, you know, Nobel laureates and very smart professors and things like this. And I thought also of the government of itself. I thought, you know, my I didn't live during that time period, so perhaps I'm wrong in this. Well, I did live, but I was, you know, a baby.
(26:14):
So it was one of those ones where I've just, like, the casualness that he
threw out of suggesting
financial repression was a good thing.
Capital controls
are a good thing. I I it just kind of staggered me a bit. I didn't understand how
everything I read in this book seemed to suggest that capital controls financial repression
(26:37):
didn't work
and
exacerbated these things. So
I just didn't really understand where he got that from.
We spent a whole book of time after time seeing how these speculators get around the rules,
and that the rules are either ineffective or incentivize
extra crazy behavior.
But, you know, maybe we just need another 500 years
(27:01):
of testing and and this time we'll get it right. You know? So
I don't know.
It the ending seemed rather strange for me. So just a little extra detail there.
Summary, similar books, recommendations.
While on the topic of qualms with this book, I honestly wish he'd read this a decade later to include the dotcom bubble and the GFC
(27:22):
because
this book is fascinating.
I love this book. It was reading this was so much fun. So so much fun.
I've learned a whole lot from it. The
despite the strange ending, I found it both broad
and penetrating
in terms of its analysis
of what it presented.
I found the the style of the writing excellent,
(27:45):
engaging,
mini stories that you you came up throughout with history. Interesting tidbits
of just just I don't know it. It wasn't hard to read. I've just found it really, really fascinating.
Extremely useful of,
human behavior, psychology
of being able to predict these things. I I think, you know,
(28:07):
I'm
considering it extremely useful for myself considering what I think it's gonna be another financial bubble coming up. And I I wanna try and predict it. I wanna try and use the learnings I've got from this to be able to to pick when I think a top will be. And if I get within a month or 2 of it, I reckon that'll be
vindication of of what I've learned from this book. So stay tuned for that on the, me and Mortals channel. So,
(28:31):
fantastic book. Loved it. 8 and a half out of 10. Devil take them behind most by Edward Chancellor with the subtitle A History of Financial Speculation.
Similar books recommendations. It reminds me of things like The Big Short Inside the Doomsday Machine,
which is also
a pretty good movie, The Big Short.
(28:52):
I think Mike was it Michael Scott who who wrote that?
That that's a great book. If you
in the similar sense that it doesn't really deal with the numbers, it's more about the stories related to the people, the feeling of the time and
an explanation of how these bubbles occurred.
If you want something once more against
(29:12):
the feeling of the time,
we have done
The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald,
which gives a feeling of of the
19 twenties, I believe,
and also the Aspen papers by,
Thomas Hardy,
who also sorry, Henry Henry James,
(29:34):
takes place in these time periods and 2 of the time periods that are mentioned in this book, and those book reviews on this channel, if you want to go check them out.
It's also inspired me to read The Gilded Age by Mark Twain, which funnily enough takes place in the Gilded Age. So that will be jumping up into these book reviews. And, once I get my hand on that book, I will certainly be reading that, in short order.
(29:57):
So
that's it for today. Thank you, everyone, for joining in. This is a value for value podcast.
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(30:18):
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(30:50):
So,
that's it for today. I am live as usual on Wednesdays.
I had to change things up on Christmas and on today
cause I was a not hungover. I was just tired because I stayed up to watch the fireworks, you know. So, I was a little bit later today than normal, and as I was on Christmas. But I will be going back to that 11 AM Australian Eastern Standard Time on a Wednesday. We'd really love if you can join me in the future live.
(31:15):
What is coming up? So I have next week will be the mysterious,
won't be so mysterious because I've still got to put
a schedule out. So
mysterious up until now book review coming out of an autobiography
which
is not normal for this channel or for me in particular,
but has a very close personal connection to myself. It's probably going to be a bit of a heartfelt book review that one.
(31:42):
So that one's coming up. I am also what am I also reading at the moment? Well, I'm gonna do a review
of this here, which is
The Alchemist
or Lou Alchemista.
I have both of these books here, one written in
English with the translation and then the original in Portuguese.
So it's not going to be
(32:03):
a book review of The Alchemist because I've already done that before, but it will be on translations in general,
which is also tying into a comment I received recently from
one of our our fans of the channel, Cole McCormick, who was asking about the translation
our I read of the Odyssey
because there is a movie coming out of that in the next year or 2, and there was a little bit of social media controversy or something like that. I don't know.
(32:29):
So,
that's coming up.
I'm already mentioned the gilded age. What am I reading? There's book just over there. I can't see it. I also have behind me How the World Really Works, Infinite Jess by David Foster Wallace. I'm not sure if I'll read that. That's pretty big book.
End of Green Gables and The Man Who Was Thursday by,
(32:51):
Chesterton. And that's probably gonna go high up on the list as well. So a whole bunch of stuff coming up day bang by Roosh V,
a whole bunch of stuff coming up. So don't worry, there is going to be plenty of book reviews coming up all this in this channel on the next
5 months, at the very least, when I go traveling,
I still intend to read and do book reviews. So
(33:13):
that'll just be a little bit more chaotic in terms of timing, because I'm going to be in Europe and things like that. So
lots of fun stuff coming up. I really do,
I hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world and chat for now. Karen out. Happy New Year. Bye.
All of the fun of gambling without any of the boring math.
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the mere mortals book reviews in the new year,
2025.
Happy new year. I hope you had a very merry Christmas
(00:20):
at that as well. I am indeed recording here live on the 1st January 2025.
And what better way to welcome in the new year than for me to
reveal to you my inner degenerate gambler?
Okay. No. I'm not gonna do that. I do have one, but we're we're not gonna reveal that today. We will be talking about some other degenerate gamblers in this book here, though. Devil Take the Hindmost, a history of financial speculation
(00:46):
by Edward Chancellor.
So this book was published in 1999,
400 pages in length, and probably talking about 8 hours reading.
It's all notes in here. It's just notes. You'd think maybe something related to financial speculation would have a lot of graphs and numbers and statistics, but no. You're not actually gonna find that in here. What you're actually gonna find is a series of series of snapshots across history of financial speculation, so called bubbles.
(01:14):
So
this presents not only the instances of craziness, but also
the feeling of the time, how they arose, what the interaction between
governments and people, technologies of the time, all relating to these bubbles, which will be the things like the tulip mania
in
Holland in the I think that was 1500 to 1600 period somewhere in there, of the Gilded Age in America, which was the 1800. Think of Mark Twain era
(01:44):
of things like the Japanese financial bubble
in the late in, late 1980
period.
What else do we have? The,
South Sea bubble, which was
related to England
in the
17, 8 100 period. You got you're already thinking like, Karen, why are you struggling with this? It's because there's so many of these damn bubbles that picked up in this book. It is wild how many
(02:10):
were actually in here across history.
So
it's not as a mentioned, not super heavy on statistics.
So
you're not gonna see
actual numbers of the it rose this percentage fell by this percentage other than than some very basic ones.
No graphs, no tables, no anything like that. This is more related to the feeling, I guess.
(02:34):
I found it quite in-depth in terms of the structure of how it was set out.
And we do have 9 chapters here
with titles such as stop stop jobbing in change alley, the projecting
age of the 16 nineties, the never to be forgot or forgiven South Sea scheme, fool's gold, the emerging market of the 18 twenties.
(02:54):
You know, cowboy capitalism from Bretton Woods to Michael Milken.
There's many of these agents that he captures in here. I guess 8
of them in total,
is is what I would say just from these chapters.
So it's pretty extensive.
Let's jump on to some of the themes and questions,
which will reveal some interesting stuff that has happened throughout the throughout the ages of financial speculation.
(03:18):
What I want to focus on here is a couple of different questions that arise, I think, from this book.
One, which is do financial bubbles occur throughout history?
Yes. This one definitely proves that. What is their structure? Why do they occur? Can they be stopped? Are they good, bad, neutral phenomena? Let's dive into some of these questions, which I think this book really answers for us. So what's unquestionable is that financial bubbles occur that's
(03:45):
put to bed put to rest, these things definitely do happen.
So they typically, and this is my own
kind of reading between the lines of similarities
of what occurred in these,
because he doesn't
lay it out in a step by step structure of, like, step 1,
step 2, step 3, step 4. This is more what I've taken from
(04:06):
reading of all of these financial bubbles and going like, okay, there seem to be some similarities. So
typically in an an economy that is doing well due to increased productivity,
AKA during the Dutch Golden Age, so think of the Dutch East India
or Dutch West India
Trading Companies, these
places where they were just
(04:27):
raking in ridiculous profits. I think they're the most profitable companies
in history and had the largest
financial capitalizations
due to their trading of the of spices and things like that. And I've done some book reviews on on these spice wars and things like this before.
The tulip mania occurred during then. So that was when the tulip prices of bulbs got up to ridiculous levels.
(04:52):
We have a new financial market or innovations emerge. So this would be the things of inventions of brokers, stock exchanges,
derivatives, leverage.
And this is common across all of the ages.
Easy for retail to access, so this being, you know, just
financial participants
such as myself or the average layperson.
(05:15):
So this is where you'll see coffee houses were proliferating
in the England bubbles just in general. This was a pretty common place for retail people to come in and be able to get in. We have information
dissemination, so radio during the American roaring twenties, for example.
And with a government
without much regulation
or perhaps too much regulation, too much meddling, or an inability to enforce their laws, which they're trying to regulate and meddle in. And we see this with the Japanese government and officials
(05:46):
playing with the currency and the laws,
to encourage investment only in Japan during the 19 eighties, a Japanese bubble. So
all of this is,
I I kind of broke it into 4 stages. You have the kind of formation when times are good, people have extra cash to play around. And so they go in, like, I'm gonna financially speculate,
(06:06):
AKA gamble, AKA invest. There's a very
thin line between these three words.
We then see these these bubbles start to form and they get stronger and there's these self feedback loops of people making more money and they're starting to create these,
very interesting mechanisms for for how these bubbles start to go. We get to this crazy mania stage where it's like everyone's making bank
(06:32):
money hand over fist. Everyone's loving life.
It then pops and we have the aftermath of usually pretty big drawdowns of
50 to 80%
seem to be around the rough rages that that these
bubbles
burst down to. So
why do they occur? Well, it starts with a question, I guess, about investment,
(06:53):
speculation, and gambling.
We have
some funny little definitions right at the start here to try and
distinguish between these. I'll read out a tiny little quote here, which you can find in the preface
on page
x I, sort of page 9 in the preface.
Similar definite problems of definition are encountered in distinguishing speculation from gambling. While a bad investment may be a speculation, a poorly executed speculation is often described as a gamble.
(07:22):
And then the psychology to speculation and gambling are almost indistinguishable.
Both are dangerously addictive habits, which involve an appeal to fortune, are often accompanied by delusional behavior and are dependent for success on the control of emotions.
So there's a kind of multitude of factors that I think played in with it.
You know, what is an investment versus gambling,
(07:45):
I think goes into things like how much research effort went into something, the time period of holding it, the range of expected returns, the structural setup of the market, etcetera.
Ultimately, it's rooted in consciousness. We're we're conscious human beings. Therefore, we act on self interest,
and a lot of this is evolutionary
(08:06):
in nature.
And therefore, the, you
know,
human self independence decision making,
is also getting mixed in with our, you know, our desire to do better, to to have more, to accumulate status and wealth and things like this.
Tempered with that we are humans and we have a lot of emotional mixes. So you've got these
(08:28):
two forces,
1 self interest and then 2, you know, regular human emotions
playing together
and interacting in markets. So there is something called the efficient market hypothesis. And this is all getting to this question. Why do these things occur? Well, we have markets. We're bartering. I think that's undeniable that that stuff happens. You can never stamp that out. And children will barter with sticks on a playground, for example, and stones and random stuff. So this is innate in our in our nature.
(09:00):
What
the efficient market hypothesis, and this is from some economic economists
postulate, which is that,
let me get this exactly right,
that the all asset replaces
reflect all available data.
Now we can quibble on definitions, but essentially, this is saying that
(09:21):
the price of something is always what it should be priced at. So even if it jumps from $10 to $100 within a day,
that is reflecting all the available data that is on this
asset. And that that $100
price is the kind of fair value
of the the, you know, the efficient market hypothesis efficiently. We're marketing this this
(09:43):
price increase because more productivity is gonna come, etcetera, etcetera,
going on from that.
Now I think this is kind of retarded to be to be honest.
Once again, you can quibble on definitions,
with related to some of these things. But, you know, is it irrational greed or rational people making poor analysis
(10:03):
when prices go to these ridiculous levels, and then they go up, and then they go down,
rather rapidly.
I take the
one of my favorite memes is the, the risk I took was calculated, but man,
am I bad at math?
And I think that that sums up a lot of this really, really nicely, which is, yeah, sure. There's,
(10:25):
you could say that the the market is efficient and that prices, you know, people get into the price they deserve and that the prices are just reflective of what people want.
But I think people are irrational, and therefore, the markets
become irrational as well. So I on that side of things.
The adjectives to describe speculators
(10:46):
are things like frenzied, mad, wild, exuberant, plague stricken, walking ghosts,
if things go wrong.
And I think that you can describe market prices when they go into these bubble periods as
the prices exhibit
similarly
chaotic behavior,
non reflective of the underlying
(11:06):
asset, which they are
speculating on.
So I think that's that's personal opinion there. What I gained from this book, can they be stopped?
I don't think you can stamp out human emotions.
We
have a lot of bots trading in markets nowadays for example.
I don't think that
(11:27):
stops human emotions
filtering into
the bots trading, for example, I think there's still implicit
assumptions and still, there's ultimately still humans behind it. And they can turn it off and you know, sell to sell buy buy buy hold, you know, whatever it is. I think those still happen in in financial markets in these bubbles. I'm talking about just these particular bubbles, not the markets as a whole over a,
(11:52):
you know, 50 year time period or a rolling average of a decade or anything like that. Just talking about these specific instances in time.
So
I don't think you can stamp out investing
speculation
slash gambling because they are on the spectrum.
Most people if you had to ask them,
you know, is investment actually, I'm jumping forward.
(12:15):
I'll leave that for a second.
I don't think you can stamp it out. They are the same thing. You know, even though governments throw some half assed or perhaps even full assed rules
at people, regulations,
laws,
They either get around them or they flaunt them,
despite the the government, and they can't enforce them.
There's
(12:36):
people just do it in a different name. It didn't talk much about this in the book, but many governments and ideologies over time have tried to stamp out
financial speculation and markets and to control markets.
Let's think particularly of the USSR, which had the, you know, the central control. We're going to control prices,
which will stop
(12:57):
the the bourgeoisie
from exploiting the the peasants and things like this. And in the end, black markets just emerged. And
you have these just ridiculous
untruths or distorted realities where the government says it's this thing, but in reality it's it's this price or it's this thing. And they just don't match. You can't you can't control these things. So
(13:21):
that's an extreme case. But you also have things like tariffs, import export bans.
So the
the different types of bubbles, the thing that makes me think that they can't be stopped is
these different bubbles have occurred over
one various different time periods in history. This book only goes back to the 1500 where we have decent data on this, but you can bet your ass this was happening in ancient Egypt.
(13:47):
That occurred in different periods of time
under different financial conditions, under different governments,
trying to control
them in various ways or not control them in various ways.
And
I just don't think they can be stopped. There was this great point in the book where
it gives them a quote from an economic Yale professor,
(14:09):
an economist
that thought that the pro prohibition. So this was the,
clamping down of alcohol, particularly, I believe, was the 19 twenties
in,
in America or maybe it was
1910s.
I don't know that period exactly well. He thought that prohibition would make the country more productive because you'd have less people drinking
(14:32):
and
that this would therefore make the country more productive.
Ultimately, what happens, you know,
crime families arose.
People spent all their time trying to
find ways to find alcohol instead of actually working.
And so, you know, that's not that has never stopped anyone.
Let's, let's leave it at that. I don't think these things can be stopped. Is this good, bad or neutral? You know,
(14:57):
once again, it depends on the definition. If you asked, I think the average person on the spit on the street is investing your money a good thing? They'd probably say, Yeah, If you ask them, is gambling your money a good thing? They'd probably say no. And then is speculating a good or bad thing? You know, maybe they'd say in the middle. That's that's, you know, because speculation is just kind of
(15:17):
a riskier form of of investment
or a safer form of gambling.
So so I think
it just depends on on your point of view. If you're asking
with regards to those 3, this book is on financial speculation. So you're probably going to get this right down the middle of the road
(15:37):
opinion,
on whether it's good or bad.
I view them more as a force of nature. They're impartial and unstoppable, the these these bubbles. So
and financial speculation arising from that, I don't think you can control the people. So you're going to have these financial bubbles popping up. The question is,
is this
(15:57):
a harmful deleterious
to the
the the market slash the country slash the world as a whole?
I think I our actions can exacerbate
the kind of energy or destructiveness
or perhaps productivity that this energy
is is creating this financial speculation is,
(16:18):
to
channel it to productive or destructive purposes. So
compare the hurricane,
hurricane Katrina effects
in New Orleans
to the aftermath of the global financial crisis in in 2008, for example. So
in both of these cases is where you had a small amount of people,
(16:39):
corrupt
and slash or incompetent,
which had a huge effect on larger markets and larger people ultimately causing a lot of normal people suffering
because of their actions. This in particular being that the the the flood,
I think it was like the floodgates or the
(16:59):
flood protections for typhoons, hurricanes, things like that were inadequate in in New Orleans. And this was due to, I believe, government
and people, corruption slash incompetence. And they knew that these these levies weren't going to hold well. And this ended up flooding and then, you know, causing a lot of people suffering. Same thing with the GFC.
(17:21):
People were messing around with money, other people's money in banks using,
CDCs
collateral
debt,
CDOs,
collateral collateral debt obligations. I believe they were
essentially levering up,
you know, giving money out to to people who probably shouldn't have money so that they could make more money. And this
(17:44):
eventually spread to the wider market so that even though here in Australia,
I don't know if we had these particular things going on in our economy. I don't believe so.
The US was able to affect us. Obviously, that's a very bad thing. But you could use similar examples and go, okay. But are there ways of channeling the natural forces of
of,
(18:04):
let's say, a volcano
then make a or a dam and of a waterfall to make a hydro,
a hydroelectric power plant and channel that energy into good use? Can these financial markets also have a similar thing where
that energy is being put into good use and that
people who, for example, were perhaps
(18:24):
on the lower end of the financial spectrum were able to make a lot of money quickly,
get out of it, and then their lives are now better from that. You know, there's
there's there's questions to be raised, I think, from this and that I don't think the book
there's one kind of little critique of the book. I don't think it's
really gets into too much in the aftermath
(18:45):
of what exactly happened in the periods after this.
Did this how much suffering did these financial bubbles cause to people? Because there were certainly winners and losers from these. There was people who,
were
financially poor and then,
you know, made a better life for themselves. There are people who are rich and lost a whole bottom bunch of money. Usually, a lot of people would would say the the Gini coefficient of having these large
(19:13):
scale differences in between the the haves and the have nots in society.
If it gets too big, that's bad.
And so bringing it down to a more natural level, these financial bubbles, do they do that?
It's hard to know. That's that's something I'd really like to have known. So
one thing this book has changed and altered my opinion of is the free markets. And I used to be
(19:38):
of the opinion that the free market's a good thing. This is what you want. The,
it's it's a kind of unilateral
good.
Every time that free markets are distorted is when you have the human suffering and the
unrealities
of things that you'll see like in this in the Soviet Union
(19:58):
or
just very distorted markets, which
it's like getting away from the truth of the world.
It's kind of all to my opinion in that it's much like that
quote that's always
given to Winston Churchill.
Everyone gives quotes to Winston Churchill. So I don't know how much to believe of that nowadays or not, but that's,
(20:18):
democracy is not the best form of government. It's simply the the least worst.
And I'm I'm slightly
sliding towards the viewer. At least it's opened my mind to the possibility that the same thing could be said of free markets
because
and that a free market is simply the least worst form of having a market
(20:39):
because
the
regulations and things like that, I don't think they work. I think they ended up cause more suffering to humans and,
and financial repression, coercion, things like that. Yet the amount of
bribery, fraud, corruption, backstabbing, lying and manipulation
across all of these free markets,
(21:00):
financial bubbles is off chops. The amount of bullshit that you just see people doing in this book
was wild.
It just just as staggering.
And I would describe these financial bubbles as,
you know, this is where you could argue, okay, but the the government was or
other people
(21:20):
government in particular was fucking around with the money. They were doing things that forced people to financially speculate. And I think there is a case for that. So you could say that the
the
the cause of these financial bubbles is
not a free market. And so therefore these things happen.
(21:43):
I don't know this is getting into like second, third order effects.
If you have a free market, shouldn't that then correct the
imbalances that you see from non free markets? I don't know. All I'm saying is that
I can't view them as universally good as I as I once thought.
Because the evidence in this book, the it doesn't really align with that.
(22:06):
So humans are mostly good,
but there's still enough shit ones and circumstances
exist
that will make or force
or tempt normal people to do some dodgy shit is is, all I can say on that. So
very, very interesting in that regard. Let's jump on to the author, perhaps some extra details.
The author, Edward Chancellor, was born in 1962,
(22:28):
financial journalist, historian,
worked in banks. I believe he's English.
Not much extra on him to talk about, but so much extra that I couldn't fit into this book review. So
I took
extensive notes,
a ridiculous amount of notes.
And I will be doing another
(22:49):
side piece to this whole book on financial speculation.
I'm not gonna be doing it on this channel like Juan does with his extra learnings.
I'm gonna be putting it on the main mere mortals channel. Two reasons for this.
One is we've got a gap coming up in that, episode in our normal recording where one's gonna be away. So I will do a solo sode. So I think there's a perfect opportunity for that. And then the second is I want to expand it out, pass the book, and make some predictions for a the next financial bubble that I think is gonna happen related particularly to crypto in 2025,
(23:25):
I I e, this year,
in particular, the banana zone,
which is a shirt I am wearing right now,
which captures this idea that there's gonna be a bubble and it's gonna be pretty wild. So
look out for that on the MIMO models channel in probably about 2 to 3 weeks time.
I will try to include a link down below if I remember
(23:46):
in in 3 weeks time.
Another thing that I just wanted to add on this book was it's just such a strange ending to the book. So the ending in particular
was kind of the conclusion. So,
epilogue, the case of the rogue economists,
and it's
20, 23 pages long.
It was a bit baffling to me. I didn't understand
(24:10):
because I found the book relatively neutral. I thought he just presented really nice facts.
It was engaging interesting, but
the ending of this was I think where he chucked in a lot of his
opinions, which is fine.
You know, it's his book. He can do what I have, whatever the hell he wants. I just found it baffling. So for example, it talks about long term capital management
(24:34):
right at the end here, which is a hedge fund which
existed, I think, in the 19 nineties.
They had, you know, these
quants Nobel laureates, I believe the the Myron Scholes equation,
which was to do with pricing of markets and things like this.
And they ended up basically just levering levering up like crazy, you
(24:57):
know, 100 x leverage on,
on their capital,
and blowing up because they weren't as smart as they thought they were.
This was it. And then he was using this as an example of saying like, this is why we need governments to regulate
and to stop things like this, to
(25:18):
not let these financial bubbles get out of control because this is what people do with them. They're, you know, they
create if they're not fraudulent, then they're idiots and they fuck it up for everyone else.
This just seemed really out of place for me because from what I understood, this was a non speculative
hedge fund.
They tried to make money off of essentially arbitrage
(25:42):
and big bets on very unrisky things, but
their their risk management didn't capture
individual tiny little events, and they missed out on this kind of black swan things that could happen.
And I thought it was the darling of the ivory tower because it had all of these, you know, Nobel laureates and very smart professors and things like this. And I thought also of the government of itself. I thought, you know, my I didn't live during that time period, so perhaps I'm wrong in this. Well, I did live, but I was, you know, a baby.
(26:14):
So it was one of those ones where I've just, like, the casualness that he
threw out of suggesting
financial repression was a good thing.
Capital controls
are a good thing. I I it just kind of staggered me a bit. I didn't understand how
everything I read in this book seemed to suggest that capital controls financial repression
(26:37):
didn't work
and
exacerbated these things. So
I just didn't really understand where he got that from.
We spent a whole book of time after time seeing how these speculators get around the rules,
and that the rules are either ineffective or incentivize
extra crazy behavior.
But, you know, maybe we just need another 500 years
(27:01):
of testing and and this time we'll get it right. You know? So
I don't know.
It the ending seemed rather strange for me. So just a little extra detail there.
Summary, similar books, recommendations.
While on the topic of qualms with this book, I honestly wish he'd read this a decade later to include the dotcom bubble and the GFC
(27:22):
because
this book is fascinating.
I love this book. It was reading this was so much fun. So so much fun.
I've learned a whole lot from it. The
despite the strange ending, I found it both broad
and penetrating
in terms of its analysis
of what it presented.
I found the the style of the writing excellent,
(27:45):
engaging,
mini stories that you you came up throughout with history. Interesting tidbits
of just just I don't know it. It wasn't hard to read. I've just found it really, really fascinating.
Extremely useful of,
human behavior, psychology
of being able to predict these things. I I think, you know,
(28:07):
I'm
considering it extremely useful for myself considering what I think it's gonna be another financial bubble coming up. And I I wanna try and predict it. I wanna try and use the learnings I've got from this to be able to to pick when I think a top will be. And if I get within a month or 2 of it, I reckon that'll be
vindication of of what I've learned from this book. So stay tuned for that on the, me and Mortals channel. So,
(28:31):
fantastic book. Loved it. 8 and a half out of 10. Devil take them behind most by Edward Chancellor with the subtitle A History of Financial Speculation.
Similar books recommendations. It reminds me of things like The Big Short Inside the Doomsday Machine,
which is also
a pretty good movie, The Big Short.
(28:52):
I think Mike was it Michael Scott who who wrote that?
That that's a great book. If you
in the similar sense that it doesn't really deal with the numbers, it's more about the stories related to the people, the feeling of the time and
an explanation of how these bubbles occurred.
If you want something once more against
(29:12):
the feeling of the time,
we have done
The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald,
which gives a feeling of of the
19 twenties, I believe,
and also the Aspen papers by,
Thomas Hardy,
who also sorry, Henry Henry James,
(29:34):
takes place in these time periods and 2 of the time periods that are mentioned in this book, and those book reviews on this channel, if you want to go check them out.
It's also inspired me to read The Gilded Age by Mark Twain, which funnily enough takes place in the Gilded Age. So that will be jumping up into these book reviews. And, once I get my hand on that book, I will certainly be reading that, in short order.
(29:57):
So
that's it for today. Thank you, everyone, for joining in. This is a value for value podcast.
I do all of these podcasts free, available anytime, anywhere, any place for anyone. All I ask is that you provide some value back. There's never gonna be any sponsorships, nor ads, nor
anything like that on this channel.
(30:18):
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Word-of-mouth really, really helps out. Talent. Give me some book reviews of or books that I should read that you want me to to recommend or read on this channel and do a review of. I really love hearing those. And then finally, you can send some treasure in as well. We have a PayPal link down below and some other options available. Meremortalspodcast.com/support.
(30:50):
So,
that's it for today. I am live as usual on Wednesdays.
I had to change things up on Christmas and on today
cause I was a not hungover. I was just tired because I stayed up to watch the fireworks, you know. So, I was a little bit later today than normal, and as I was on Christmas. But I will be going back to that 11 AM Australian Eastern Standard Time on a Wednesday. We'd really love if you can join me in the future live.
(31:15):
What is coming up? So I have next week will be the mysterious,
won't be so mysterious because I've still got to put
a schedule out. So
mysterious up until now book review coming out of an autobiography
which
is not normal for this channel or for me in particular,
but has a very close personal connection to myself. It's probably going to be a bit of a heartfelt book review that one.
(31:42):
So that one's coming up. I am also what am I also reading at the moment? Well, I'm gonna do a review
of this here, which is
The Alchemist
or Lou Alchemista.
I have both of these books here, one written in
English with the translation and then the original in Portuguese.
So it's not going to be
(32:03):
a book review of The Alchemist because I've already done that before, but it will be on translations in general,
which is also tying into a comment I received recently from
one of our our fans of the channel, Cole McCormick, who was asking about the translation
our I read of the Odyssey
because there is a movie coming out of that in the next year or 2, and there was a little bit of social media controversy or something like that. I don't know.
(32:29):
So,
that's coming up.
I'm already mentioned the gilded age. What am I reading? There's book just over there. I can't see it. I also have behind me How the World Really Works, Infinite Jess by David Foster Wallace. I'm not sure if I'll read that. That's pretty big book.
End of Green Gables and The Man Who Was Thursday by,
(32:51):
Chesterton. And that's probably gonna go high up on the list as well. So a whole bunch of stuff coming up day bang by Roosh V,
a whole bunch of stuff coming up. So don't worry, there is going to be plenty of book reviews coming up all this in this channel on the next
5 months, at the very least, when I go traveling,
I still intend to read and do book reviews. So
(33:13):
that'll just be a little bit more chaotic in terms of timing, because I'm going to be in Europe and things like that. So
lots of fun stuff coming up. I really do,
I hope you're having a fantastic day wherever you are in the world and chat for now. Karen out. Happy New Year. Bye.
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