Three centuries ago, the Sephardi merchant Joseph de la Vega wrote the first-ever book on a mysterious, disruptive new invention that was taking off in Amsterdam at the time. His evocative description of the stock market still resonates.
“This enigmatic business which is at once the fairest and most deceitful in Europe, the noblest and the most infamous in the world, the finest and the most vulgar on earth. It is a quintessence of academic learning and a paragon of fraudulence; it is a touchstone for the intelligent and a tombstone for the audacious,” he wrote in Confusion of Confusions, first published in 1688.
All these qualities have been abundant in 2021, which has been dominated by the mayhem surrounding GameStop, a dowdy video games retailer that suddenly found itself playing the hapless, inadvertent protagonist in a Wall Street morality play with wildly conflicting narratives.