From tulip mania in Rembrandt's Amsterdam to the Souk Al Manakh crash in Kuwait and the Nikkei-real estate asset spiral in Japan in the 1980s, financial bubbles in disperse cultures and societies exhibit eerie parallels.
Asset prices begin to soar beyond any concept of intrinsic value.
A mass hysteria for leveraged speculation overtakes the investment world. Dutch tulips or Tokyo office towers or Internet IPO's. Supposedly prudent banks are happy to create a Matterhorn of debt to finance the speculative mania, as the post-dated checks which financial Kuwait's Souk Al Manakh and the tokkin trusts that were the high octane fuel for the Japanese asset price bubble prove. Then something in the whole equation changes. A sea change in investor psychology takes place.