With all the financial know-how and experience of the wizards on Wall Street and elsewhere, how is it that the market still goes boom and bust? How can people be so willing to get caught up in the mania of speculation when histroy tells us that a collapse is almost sure to follow? In this wise and entertaining primer, the world-renowned economist John Kenneth Galbraith reviews the major speculative episodes of the last three centuries, from the seventeenth-century tulip craze to the calamitous junk-bond follies of the 1980s. His insights provide important lessons on speculative economics--and demonstrate conclusively that money and intelligence are not necessarily linked.