The Financial Crises That Changed the World And Redrew History

How tulips, debt bubbles, imperial bankruptcies, and a severed dollar reshaped the fate of nations.

Editor’s Note: When discussing the Money Printer, it’s essential to understand how we arrived at this point. It all goes back to a single day in August 1971 – the day our Dollar Curse began.

For 17 years, I’ve been studying the underlying challenges of society and our economy. I have now released a special report detailing my conclusions. To see my latest presentation—and get access to my new report—please click this link.

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Dear Fellow Traveler:

History isn’t just written in treaties and wars.

It’s etched in bank ledgers and the chaos of collapsing markets.

Financial crises have repeatedly shattered economies, toppled governments, and rewritten the very rules of society. I want to show you how a significant crisis can fuel massive societal changes—and lead to repercussions that last for decades.

These five collapses didn’t just rattle markets — they reshaped the modern world.

1. The Dutch Tulip Mania Crash (1637)

Ordinary tulip bulbs — yes… flowers — were the first widely documented mass-market speculative bubble.

Prices exploded until a single Semper Augustus bulb was more expensive than an Amsterdam mansion.

Merchants abandoned their basic trade to speculate in tulips.

Middle-class artisans, traders, and nobles mortgaged estates for bulb contracts on flowers they would never see.

The Dutch economy wrapped itself around and then wilted like flowers.

When February 1637 arrived, there wasn’t an economic decline.

There was a vaporization. The market didn’t crash. It disappeared.

Buyers vanished from auctions. Paper fortunes evaporated.

Men who traded businesses for tulip futures now clutched worthless contracts.

This wasn’t just a financial disaster — it was where behavioral finance was born.

The psychological pattern embedded here — denial, euphoria, panic, devastation — is still something we repeatedly ignore. Since then, every speculative mania, from railroads to crypto, has followed this Dutch template.

Tulip Mania serves as a cautionary lesson that financial experts often tell to beginners but rarely recall when they need it most.

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2. The South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi Bubble (1720)

Two financial apocalypses shattered nations simultaneously.

Britain’s South Sea Company was history’s most audacious con.

It even assumed a significant amount of national debt in exchange for worthless trading rights with Spanish colonies that they couldn’t access due to ongoing wars.

South Sea insiders famously bribed Parliament, persuaded the royal family to invest, and engaged in financial engineering to drive share prices up by 900%.

Even Sir Isaac Newton doubled down on the stock, despite executives selling their shares at record highs.

Another con emerged in France. Here, John Law, a Scottish economist, convinced the nation to support his Mississippi Company.

This wasn’t just any investment. He ultimately secured the full backing of the French monetary system. Law controlled coinage, tax collection, the central bank, and the colonial trading company. And he used all of this to inflate the value of the Mississippi Bubble in an insane, self-reinforcing spiral of delusion.

Both schemes collapsed within months of each other.

Britain’s economy froze as revelations exposed massive insider trading and high-level corruption. This implosion became a cultural driver in the conservative nature of British banks over the following centuries.

France’s fate was much worse. Their entire currency system imploded.

It shattered the middle class. It widened economic inequality in France to such a significant extent that one can draw a direct line between this economic crisis and the French Revolution.

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3. The Panic of 1873 (The Long Depression)

Most Americans are only familiar with the Great Depression, if at all.

However, a much longer economic depression occurred during the Reconstruction period.

It began when Vienna’s stock exchange crashed on Black Friday in May 1873.

This fueled a devastating financial tsunami that swept through Europe and crashed on America’s shores.

In America, we had experienced a massive post-Civil War railroad boom. Overexpansion resulted in a doubling of track mileage in just seven years.

What financed that boom? A huge swath of speculative debt.

A few months after the Vienna implosion, a massive investment bank triggered a seizure of credit markets, much like what happened with Lehman Brothers in 2008. This bank, Jay Cooke & Company, collapsed, leading to a 10-day closure of the New York Stock Exchange. About half of America’s railroads would go bankrupt.

The aftermath lasted decades, longer than the Great Depression. Prices fell year after year, fueling a deflationary spiral. Farm foreclosures swelled. City unemployment reached catastrophic levels.

This period was remarkable because of what it would later fuel. The era's politics would shape long periods of socialism and virulent nationalism across Europe.

The economic trauma of 1873 lasted decades. We saw the emergence of imperial rivalries that would later explode into World War I.

Financial conflict, you see, has fueled a long history of global conflict.

This period would further justify, in the minds of bankers, the return of a long-distrusted backstop: an American central bank.

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4. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression

The Great Depression is etched in the minds of Americans.

Black Tuesday didn’t just break the markets — it broke the world economy.

We experienced yet another speculative bubble, known as the Roaring Twenties.

During this period, brokers offered 90% margin loans, and stocks skyrocketed in value. So, the economic collapse felt… biblical.

By 1932, the Dow had collapsed 89%.

The crash was merely the opening act of a catastrophic event.

Nine thousand banks failed.

It wiped out the life savings of millions when no deposit insurance was in place.

The money supply shrank by a third as bank credit vanished. International trade collapsed by 65%. By 1933, 25% of Americans were unemployed in an era with no safety net to catch those who fell.

That time shaped the New Deal. It rewrote the social contract between government and citizens.

Social Security, federal deposit insurance, and securities regulation became permanent fixtures of American life.

For other nations, the Great Depression was a civilization-threatening system failure.

Fascism and communism would rise as alternatives in nations across the globe.

The economic devastation fertilized the soil for global extremism, setting the stage for history’s deadliest conflict: World War II.

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5. The Hidden Crisis That Cursed the Dollar

To understand the constant crises we find ourselves in, look no further.

In 1971, President Richard Nixon transformed money from something with intrinsic value into pure governmental decree.

The immediate aftermath: stagflation ravaged the 1970s, oil shocks paralyzed Western economies, and currencies gyrated wildly in newly floating exchange rates.

But the deeper transformation was more profound.

Government and private debt exploded. Once a facilitator of commerce, the financial sector morphed into the dominant economic force, eventually dwarfing the productive economy it was meant to serve.

This hidden crisis created our current reality:

We now live in a world where central banks conjure trillions out of thin air, asset bubbles are treated as economic policy, and debt has become the primary engine of economic growth.

The massive wealth inequality, financialization of everything, and boom-bust cycles we now consider normal are direct descendants of this pivotal moment.

The dollar’s curse is history’s most consequential Faustian bargain.

We now have unlimited monetary flexibility in exchange for a system inherently prone to excess, inequality, and instability.

The final accounting still awaits — but history suggests the bill always comes due.

We will continue to delve deeper into this crisis and prepare ourselves accordingly.

Stay positive.

Garrett Baldwin