Nothing has changed over the last 300 years with respect to speculative markets. During the last 110 years Congress and the Federal Reserve have been involved in developing stock market bubbles that ultimately drive prices to a point of collapse, such as 1929-1932, 1972-1974, 2000-2002, and 2007-2009. The charts illustrated below compare values of the South Sea Bubble between 1719 and 1721 with the Dow between 2000 and 2024.
The Dow Jones stock chart is a courtesy of StockCharts.com.
