In another thread, Doofrat was encouraging people to read Tulipomania. I agree. It is a great, easy read, and complete page-turner.

At one point, Mike Dash, the author, writes about the Florida land boom of 1923. “Stories began to circulate concerning the fantastic profits that could be made by buying and selling land in Florida.”

Anyway, land values trippled, money poured into the state, employment increased etc etc.

Sound familiar?

Then:

“The crash came in autumn, as crashes often do. Speculators had badly overestimated the real demand for land. The number of winter visitors was only a tenth of what had been predicted. People began to default on loans, and a man who had sold land for $12 an acre and seen successive purchasers pay $17, $30, and $60 an acre was dismayed to discover that all had failed to pay more than their initial deposit, leaving the land to revert to him. From the summer of 1926 the crisis had caused several Florida banks to fail as clearings fell from $1 billion in 1925 to $633 million a year later and eventually a mere $143 million in 1928.”