"Tulips"

31 March 2019

2 mins

Tiptoeing through financial catastrophe.

This commercial from Peter Thwaites of The Corner Shop offers a fascinating overview of one of the most notorious episodes in the history of economics - the 'tulip mania' of the Dutch Golden Age. Considered one of the world's first speculative bubbles, it led to the price of tulip bulbs climbing exponentially until the bubble burst and a lot of people lost their shirts.

The message is simple... it wouldn't have happened if everyone had been better informed and the advertised service can help people in that respect.

But the real fun of this ad is Thwaites's masterful storytelling. And the film works whether or not one has heard of 'tulip mania'... which is important as most people probably haven't. It's a perfect depiction of the viral impact of greed as one transaction leads to another until all reason has been lost. In that sense, it's an explanation of Brexit which has also involved uninformed people passing on speculative information to one another, albeit through social media rather than on 17th century market stalls.

USA

Financial Services