ABSTRACT
The chapter proposes a comparative reading of narratives of speculation in the 19th century. A crowd of emotional people act in financial markets in the stories told both in economics and fiction. Most characters portrayed in financial sceneries suffer from cognitive biases and are prone to be prey to collective moods. Stock markets are notable for their asymmetric information, lack of transparency and inequality of wealth and power of leading operators. The reference to gambling recurs in economics and fiction alike, as the opposition between speculation and investment, or the emotional resonance and ethical evaluation of speculative business. Novelists portrayed fraudulent financiers and the stories of their speculations or crash in bankruptcies; economists dealt with “commercial crises”, trying to account for the recurrence of manias and panics in market economies.
