Robin Wigglesworth

speaker

1,983 appearances 13 recordings 1 series first heard May 2026 last heard 12 Aug

Robin Wigglesworth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 13 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 5.

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

I'm Robin Williamsworth.

So we're going to get to all those events I mentioned, but let's start at the beginning.

Let's go back to 1871 in Germany and Austria.

And there's this huge, insane, never-seen-before boom happening on the stock markets in both countries at the same time.

Ljarke, can you tell me, help me paint a picture of what it was like at the time?

This wasn't London or even Paris at the time.

They were small stock markets.

And quite often they would give journalists shares in return for positive press, right?

No, no, this does not sound entirely above board.

And obviously, minor aristocrats and journalists are unfortunately going to be a bit of an underlying villain of our story today.

But there was one, of course, from your book, I was delighted to read, there was a Viennese journalist who made fun of all this stuff.

He could clearly see where things were going.

And there's this great quote where he said that,

Companies were founded to transport the Aurora Borealis in pipelines to St.

Stephen's Square and to win mass sales for boot polish among the natives of the South Sea Islands.

So he's clearly mocking this giant boom that started in 1871 and continued until 1873.

It became known as the Grundersite, or in English, the Founders' Era, the boom of the founders.

It's kind of a hot tech bubble.

What caused it?

And he succeeded on both accounts, right?

Showing 21–40 of 1,983 · page 2 of 100