Market Crashes !!!

The government attempted to step in and halt the crash by offering to honor contracts at 10% of the face value, but then the market plunged even lower, making such restitution impossible. No one emerged unscathed from the crash. Even the people who had locked in their profit by getting out early suffered under the following depression.

When: 1634-1637
Where: Holland

The market declined from peak to bottom?: This number is difficult to calculate, but, we can tell you that at the peak of the market, a person could trade a single tulip for an entire estate, and, at the bottom, one tulip was the price of a common onion.

The city of Rome may have begun as a salt-trading center, like Venice after it. Certainly the salt traders of the Roman port of Ostia raised the price so high that the state was forced to take over the industry about 506 BC. Man-made salt-ponds along the Mediterranean shore date back to Roman times, and it is inevitable that we will find older ones. Salt was already being mined in the Alps when Rome was founded

Pepper has been a part of our trading past - it's value at one time equalling gold.

Pepper was so valuable that it was often used as collateral or even currency. The taste for pepper (or the appreciation of its monetary value) was passed on to those who would see Rome fall. It is said that both Attila the Hun and Alaric the Visigoth demanded from Rome a ransom of more than a ton of pepper when they besieged the city in 5th century A.D. After the fall of Rome, others took over the middle legs of the spice trade, first Byzantium and then the Arabs. By the end of the Dark Ages, the central portions of the spice trade were firmly under Islamic control. Once into the Mediterranean, the trade was largely monopolized by Italian powers, especially Venice and Genoa. The rise of these city-states was funded in large part by the spice trade.

Cinnamon was always considered a precious commodity to the ancient Romans and by the 1st century A.D. writings referred to 350 grams of cinnamon being equal in value to over five kilograms of silver. So prized was it was that in the first century C.E. the Roman general Pliny the Elder wrote that the Arabian tales were crafted to inflate prices. The Romans had a wide variety of uses for cinnamon, making the herb one of the most highly sought after gems of its time.

http://www.onlygold.com/tutorialpages/HistoryFS.htm

GOLD is dispersed widely throughout the geologic world, its discovery occurred to many different groups in many different locales. And nearly everyone who found it was impressed with it, and so was the developing culture in which they lived.

In the quest for gold by the Phoenicians, Egyptians, Indians, Hittites, Chinese, and others, prisoners of war were sent to work the mines, as were slaves and criminals. And this happened during a time when gold had no value as 'money,' but was just considered a desirable commodity in and of itself.

Gold was money in ancient Greece. The Greeks mined for gold throughout the Mediterranean and Middle East regions by 550 B.C., and both Plato and Aristotle wrote about gold and had theories about its origins. Gold was associated with water (logical, since most of it was found in streams), and it was supposed that gold was a particularly dense combination of water and sunlight.

At the height of the Empire (A.D. 98-160), Roman gold and silver coins reigned from Britain to North Africa and Egypt.Money had been invented. Its name was gold.