Tulip mania.........................

Sounds like fun..............................

     No actual delivery of tulips took place during the height of the boom in late 1636 and early 1637 as the bulbs remained snug in the ground.  A market in tulip futures appeared, known as the windhandel (the wind trade):  sellers promised to deliver a bulb of a certain type and weight the following spring, buyers took the right to delivery - in the meantime, cash settlement could be made for any difference in market price.  Most transactions were expedited with personal credit notes which also fell due in the spring when the bulbs would be dug up and delivered.  Gaergoedt boasts of having made 60,000 guilders from his tulip speculations but admits that he has only received "other people's writing."  By the later stages of the mania the fusion of the windhandel with paper credit created a perfect symmetry of insubstantiality:  most transactions were for tulip bulbs that could never be delivered because they didn't exist and were paid for with credit notes that could never be honoured because the  money wasn't there.

Edward Chancellor,  Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation