The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen again

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, no sponsored CTAs, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s worth it. Upgrade In February 1637, a single tulip bulb in Haarlem sold for 5,200 guilders - the price of a canal house on the Keizersgracht // ten times the annual salary of a skilled craftsman. The bulb was a Semper Augustus, streaked white and flame-red, and the buyer never saw it. He bought a piece of paper representing a future flower, and within 3 weeks, the market collapsed. Men who had mortgaged their workshops to buy futures on something they would never hold went home to explain it to their families. Within a century, the Dutch and English were back, inside the South Sea Company, whose directors had printed prospectuses for an undertaking they refused to describe. Within two centuries, French investors were holding the…