Bubble in the Sun Quotes

“local cows, deprived of feed, began to starve.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“The parallels between the story of the Florida land boom and the events leading up to the Great Recession remain uncanny as well. In both cases, the leveraging of real estate (and personal balance sheets) led to inevitable collapse. Leverage and real estate create a toxic combination; a better awareness of this toxicity can help us to avoid, in advance, a repeat of such cataclysmic mistakes.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“see, the corruption would reach all the way to the office of the vice president of the United States and soon contributed to a cascade of bank failures: 117 in Florida and Georgia in one ten-day period in late 1926. In fact, according to banking historian Raymond B. Vickers, 90 percent of the Florida banks that failed were guilty of self-dealing or outright fraud by insiders. Vickers, who studied bank records from the period that had been sealed for sixty-three years, concluded: “The sad story told by these records is that insiders looted the banks they pledged to protect. They tried to get rich by wildly speculating with depositors’ money, and when their schemes failed, so did their banks.” So, one didn’t need to belong to the Ashley gang to rob a Florida bank in the 1920s. There were white-collar methods of theft that were equally effective and far less likely to be detected or prosecuted.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“For example, Joseph Urban designed the Bath & Tennis Club, referred to as the B&T, in 1926. A talented architect, he was also a set designer for various operas and the Ziegfeld Follies. The socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, heir to the Postum Cereal Company fortune, the country’s wealthiest woman of her day and the wife of stockbroker E. F. Hutton, also hired Urban to finish her gargantuan home, Mar-a-Lago, a stone's throw from the B&T.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“Also known as hire purchase, installment credit was not entirely new—and consumer credit itself dated back to antiquity. In reality, according to Lendol Calder, an expert on the history of consumer credit, overindebtedness was a headache for the Pilgrims, the colonial planters, and nineteenth-century farmers: “A river of red ink,” he writes, “runs through American history.” However, up until the 1920s, installment credit had been used primarily for the sale of pianos, and, to a lesser extent, furniture and sewing machines.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“Henry Flagler, in a conversation shortly before he died in 1913, remarked to a friend, “Those men and women there [in Miami] are like boys and girls. They have never been hurt, and they know no fear.” The old tycoon understood that there is always a price to be paid for excessive risk taking and for financial naiveté.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“Perhaps no other advancement has so altered the way Americans work and play. As sociologist William F. Ogburn argued as far back as 1938: “the invention of the automobile has had more influence on society than the combined exploits of Napoleon, Genghis Kahn, and Julius Caesar.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“In response to his growing infirmities, he retreated deeper into his work. At one point, in the summer of 1907, a newspaper reported that the seventy-seven-year-old entrepreneur had suffered a nervous breakdown. As Flagler told the journalist Edwin Lefèvre in 1909, “I don’t know of anyone who has been successful, but that he has been compelled to pay some price for success. Some get it at the loss of their health, others forego the pleasures of home and spend their years in the forest or mines; some acquire success at the loss of their character, and so it goes. Many prices are paid.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“He would name it the Palm Beach Inn, and only later changed it to the Breakers. Today the Breakers, which has burned down twice, is a Florida landmark and the only one of the properties Henry Flagler built that survives as a resort hotel.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“The land boom, not the stock market, was the true catalyst for the disasters that befell the nation as overvalued housing and property prices everywhere began to collapse in the wake of the Florida debacle. The eroding economic fundamentals and collapsing consumer confidence finally reached Wall Street and pulled down the stock market, bringing an end to the frantic nationwide party so aptly named the Roaring Twenties.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“Mizner responded: “It is so beautiful that it ought to be something religious—a nunnery, with a chapel built into the lake, with a great cool cloisters and a court of oranges; a landing stage, where”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“Florida Panhandle, landholdings that would be the foundation of the du Pont family’s enormous St. Joe Paper Company, a paper mill and land development”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“In hindsight, it appears that the broader stock market was in one of those periods where it acted, in investment sage Benjamin Graham’s memorable phrase, more like a voting machine than a weighing machine.”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression

“means to afford”
― Christopher Knowlton, Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression