Market Madness

In Market Madness: A Century of Oil Panics, Crises, and Crashes, Blake Clayton uses four historical case studies to document claims about the future of the U.S. oil supply and discuss their impact on the market and policymaking. He explores the conditions in which oil supply fears arise, gain popularity, and eventually wane, and shows how important such stories can be in affecting financial markets. He takes an innovative approach commonly used to assess the role of "irrational exuberance" in the technology and housing markets to determine how unfounded pessimism affects markets in oil and other exhaustible resources.