Monitor | The Shanghai rubber bubble of 1910 holds a lesson for today
Speculative excess has a long pedigree, given how easily human desire for quick gains can overcome concerns about long-term profitability
When you are reputed to be London's most highly paid hedge fund manager, you can afford to indulge in a few whims.
David Harding's whims are a tad unusual, however. Among other things, the founder of US$26 billion hedge fund company Winton Capital has endowed a Cambridge University professorship in the public understanding of risk, and is patron of the Harding Centre for Risk Literacy at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.
A former theoretical physicist, Harding sponsors the Royal Society's Winton Prize for science books, and in 2009 he donated £20 million (HK$238 million) to Cambridge's Cavendish physics laboratory.
His latest project is equally eclectic. It's a massive and lavishly illustrated 300-page coffee table history of foolish financial speculations, co-authored with the head of Winton Capital's historical research department, James Holmes.
Harding and Holmes cover all the obvious episodes, from the Dutch tulipomania of the 17th century, through England's South Sea Bubble of 1720, right up to the 2007 subprime boom.