The tricks and tools Blunt and his associates deployed to pump their stock along Exchange Alley haven’t changed much in the three hundred years since. Then as now, such devices—the ones the South Sea directors used early in the transaction like the games with delivery as above, and many more that would appear over the course of the South Sea spring and summer—can produce innocuous results in ordinary circumstances but can become gasoline on a fire when deployed maliciously, ignorantly, or some luckless mixture of the two.
