Netherlands still seems to be very wealthy, now being the largest agricultural exporter in Europe. Man, I know some extremely rich, extremely cheap dutch people that just sit on money. Even Pennsylvania dutch, who are technically German. Them and some scotch- Irish I know are like the benevolent jews from Europe
Good dig
The company was also the first official company to issue stocks, which peaked during the Dutch “Tulip Mania”, a craze for tulip bulbs that are seen as the world’s first true financial bubble.
This also means that this was one of the first times there was a concept of market cap that people could speculate on. I guess what I'm saying is, take something like Apple: The liquidation value might be much less than the market cap. The market cap is based on speculation about future profits. Though Apple is enormously profitable, its market cap is not quite the same thing as "worth." The only way someone could buy it, as far as I know, is to merge it with another large corporation. Nobody has enough cash (or gold) to buy it. As far as I know.
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