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Tulip mania or tulipomania (Dutch names include: tulpenmanie, tulpomanie, tulpenwoede, tulpengekte and bollengekte) was a period in the Dutch Golden Age during which contract prices for bulbs of the recently introduced tulip reached extraordinarily high levels and then suddenly collapsed.

At the peak of tulip mania, in March 1637, some single tulip bulbs sold for more than 10 times the annual income of a skilled craftsman. It is generally considered the first recorded speculative bubble (or economic bubble), although some researchers have noted that the Kipper- und Wipperzeit episode in 1619–22, a Europe-wide chain of debasement of the metal content of coins to fund warfare, featured mania-like similarities to a bubble. The term "tulip mania" is now often used metaphorically to refer to any large economic bubble (when asset prices deviate from intrinsic values).

The economy of Sweden is a highly developed export-oriented economy, aided by timber, hydropower, and iron ore. These constitute the resource base of an economy oriented toward foreign trade. The main industries include motor vehicles, telecommunications, pharmaceuticals, industrial machines, precision equipment, chemical goods, home goods and appliances, forestry, iron, and steel. Traditionally, Sweden relied on a modern agricultural economy that employed over half the domestic workforce. Today Sweden further develops engineering, mine, steel, and pulp industries, which are competitive internationally, as evidenced by companies such as Ericsson, ASEA/ABB, SKF, Alfa Laval, AGA, and Dyno Nobel.

Sweden is a competitive open mixed economy. The vast majority of Swedish enterprises are privately owned and market-oriented. There is also a strong welfare state, with public-sector spending accounting up to three-fifths of GDP. In 2014, the percent of national wealth owned by the government was 24%. (Full article...)

Heroism and the respect it commands is a form of compensation by society for those who take risks for others. And entrepreneurship is a risky and heroic activity, necessary for growth or even the mere survival of the economy.

It is also necessarily collective on epistemological grounds-to facilitate the development of expertise. Someone who did not find something is providing others with knowledge, the best knowledge, that of absence (what does not work)-yet he gets little or no credit for it. He is a central part of the process with incentives going to others and, what is worse, gets no respect.

I am an ingrate toward the man whose overconfidence caused him to open a restaurant and fail, enjoying my nice meal while he is probably eating canned tuna.

In order to progress, modern society should be treating ruined entrepreneurs in the same way we honor dead soldiers, perhaps not with as much honor, but using exactly the same logic (the entrepreneur is still alive, thought perhaps morally broken and socially stigmatized, particularly if he lives in Japan.) For there is no such thing as a failed soldier, dead or alive (unless he acted in a cowardly manner)-likewise, there is no such thing as a failed entrepreneur or failed scientific researcher, any more than there is a successful babbler, philosophaster, commentator, consultant, lobbyist, or business school professor who does not take personals risks. (Sorry.)

Psychologists label "overconfidence" a disease, blinding people to the odds of success when engaging in ventures. But there is a difference between benign, heroic type of risk taking that is beneficial to others, in the antifragile case and the nastier modern type related to negative Black Swans, such as the overconfidence of "scientists" computing the risks of harm from the Fukushima reactor. In the case of the former, what they call overconfidence is a good thing, not something to medicate.

—Nassim Taleb, Antifragile, 2012

• ... that Malaysian businessman Lim Kok Wing was depicted as "King of Africa"?
• ... that Peachtree Arcade, a shopping arcade in the U.S. state of Georgia, was conceived after a local businessman visited the Cleveland Arcade?
• ... that women- and minority-owned businesses built the Frequent Express high-capacity bus line in Portland, Oregon?
• ... that Celine-Marie Pascale's work focuses on how race and class impact the way "business practices and government policies create, normalize and entrench economic struggles" to benefit the wealthy?
• ... that environmental economist V. Kerry Smith has been described as a "Renaissance Man of Economics"?
• ... that while oil and gas production is a large part of Turkmenistan's economy, there are only two oil refineries in Turkmenistan?

May 13:

• 1884 - Cyrus McCormick, an American businessman, co-founder of International Harvester Company, died on this day.

• ...that Luca Pacioli, codified the double-entry bookkeeping system in his mathematics textbook Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalità published in Venice in 1494?

• ...that, as of August 2008, more than 113 countries around the world, including all of Europe, required or permitted IFRS reporting and 85 required IFRS reporting for all domestic, listed companies?

• ...that IFRS financial statements consist of a statement of financial position, a statement of comprehensive income, a statement of changes in equity, a Statement of Cash Flows and a Notes to the Financial Statements?

• ...that in the circular flow model, the inter-dependent entities of producer and consumer are referred to as "firms" and "households" respectively and provide each other with factors in order to facilitate the flow of income?

• ...that Wassily Leontief was the first to use a matrix representation of a national economy, in his input-output model?

• ...that the balance of payments of a country is the record of all economic transactions between the residents of a country and the rest of the world in a particular period?

• ...that the existence of property rights, besides being a fundamental item in many legal systems, constitutes also the fundamental presupposition for the mathematical validity of both the accounting equation (financial statements) and the equality of gross value added and net output (national accounts)?

Wikinews Economy and business portal

• July 21: Technological University Dublin senior lecturer Dr Lorcan Sirr speaks to Wikinews on housing market in Ireland
• July 15: California governor signs new state budget, eligible Californians to get stimulus payments
• July 4: 130 OECD countries agree to back global corporate tax rate
• June 30: 'Each makes the other more difficult to recover from': University of Sussex professor L. Alan Winters speaks to Wikinews on trade, COVID-19, Brexit
• June 16: Wikinews interviews Victor Kline, leader of newly registered The New Liberals party in Australia
• April 23: Irish Finance Minister Donohoe criticises OECD's global minimum corporate tax rate
• April 17: People protest in Berlin against German Court overturning five-year rent cap
• March 5: Chancellor Rishi Sunak announces UK budget 2021
• February 10: Disney to shut down Blue Sky Studios, animation studio behind 'Ice Age'
• January 24: World Trade Organization declares US tariff hike illegal, rules in South Korea's favour