Markets, Bubbles & Crashes Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for a decline of roughly ten per cent, but less than twenty, from a recent peak in a market, generally regarded as a normal and even healthy pause in a rising trend rather than a sign of deeper trouble?

Question 2

What is the name for the first sale of a company's shares to the general public, which turns a privately held firm into one listed on a stock exchange and lets its early backers cash out and the firm raise money?

Question 3

What is the name for the English law of 1720, passed at the urging of the very company whose shares were then soaring, that made it illegal to form a joint-stock company without a royal charter?

Question 4

Which episode of October 2008 briefly made a German carmaker the most valuable listed company in the world, for a few hours, after a sports-car maker disclosed that it controlled far more of the carmaker's shares, through options, than the market had realised?

Question 5

Which American financial crisis and the five-year depression that followed were triggered by a collapse of a land-speculation boom, a tightening of credit, and a presidential order that public land be paid for only in gold or silver coin?

Question 6

What is the name for a prolonged stretch of rising share prices and investor optimism, conventionally marked from a low point once prices have climbed twenty per cent, and named for the way the animal it refers to attacks by thrusting upward?

Question 7

Which episode in the Dutch Golden Age is usually called the first recorded speculative bubble, when contracts for rare flower bulbs, especially the streaked varieties caused by a plant virus, changed hands for the price of a canal house before the market abruptly collapsed in February 1637?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

About Markets, Bubbles & Crashes

This quiz is about financial markets and the way they go wrong: the great speculative bubbles, the crashes and panics that ended them, the stock exchanges and indices where it all plays out, the everyday vocabulary of bulls and bears and margin and short selling, and the frauds that repeat in every generation. Eighty questions, each describing a bubble, a crash, an exchange, a market term, a fraudster or a piece of crisis machinery, and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it.

The first pack is the essentials: Tulip Mania, the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles, the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Black Monday of 1987, the dot-com bubble and the crisis of 2008, together with the meaning of a bull market, a bear market, a correction, buying on margin, short selling and the Dow. The second pack widens to the exchanges and indices of the world, from the New York and London exchanges to the Bombay Stock Exchange and the Sensex, more bubbles and panics, the mechanics of listings and trading halts and stock splits, and the classic frauds: Ponzi and Madoff, the collapse of Barings, Ivar Kreuger, Enron and WorldCom, Harshad Mehta and Wirecard. The third pack covers market wisdom and warning signs, the machinery of the 2008 crisis, collateralised debt obligations, credit default swaps, subprime loans, too big to fail and the bank bailouts, the regulators in the United States and India, and recent episodes from the 2010 flash crash and the GameStop squeeze to the Paytm listing and the 2020 pandemic crash.

Indian markets run through the quiz: the Bombay exchange and the Sensex, the National Stock Exchange and the Nifty, the Harshad Mehta scam, the markets regulator, the upper circuit and the Paytm float. The wrong answers are always other bubbles, crashes or terms of the same kind, so a good guess is easily checked. About a fifth of the questions carry a neutral photograph, a trading floor, an exchange, a central bank, that fits any of the four options and gives nothing away. Currency crises and cryptocurrency crashes are covered in the separate Money quiz. Names, dates and figures have been checked against standard reference works.

The recurring lesson across four centuries is how little changes: a new technology or a new financial instrument, cheap and plentiful credit, a story about why the old rules no longer apply, a scramble of latecomers, and then a scramble for the exit. The names change, tulip bulbs to railway shares to internet stocks to mortgage bonds to meme stocks, but the shape of the curve does not.