Tulip mania
A speculative episode in seventeenth-century Holland: contracts on tulip bulbs were resold at rising prices until demand vanished at once.
How to read the number
The mechanism is recognisable today — what changed hands was not a plant but the right to buy one later, with settlement deferred, so a buyer needed no money at the moment of dealing.
When the metric lies
Popular retellings inflate the scale: the trades involved a narrow circle, and the national economy was barely touched.
Also known as: tulip bubble