The South Sea stock bubble of 1720 (or the more things change, the more the stay the same)
I came across the South Sea Bubble of 1720 while looking up a tangent as I was reading my history text.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Bubble
The South Sea Company pulled off its own debt credit swap, much like businesses today, and that was almost 400 years ago.
Mercantilism (a nation-first protectionist stance that the government should encourage exports, often through national subsides, and discourage imports through tariffs or developing foreign colonies to gain raw materials that the parent nation lacks internally, instead of trading for it) was the dominant philosophy, which was quite unlike our economic outlook today. The result of people losing vast fortunes was the same though.
Adam Smith's _Wealth of Nations_ (considered to be the father of modern economics and capitalism) was written to attack mercantilism, the reigning model of power to the day, with a new way of thinking.
Thus, it's interesting to see the same kind of economic crisis happen whether it was under the lock-down policies of mercantilism or the laissez-faire policies of the Great Recession today.