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This Was The Most Valuable Company In History (Worth 10 Times More Than Apple)
Submitted by Simon Black via Sovereign Man blog,
Over four centuries ago, the Dutch East India Company made history as the world’s first IPO.
Known as VOC in the Netherlands, the company was one of the most successful ventures in the last several hundred years.
When adjusted for inflation, its highest market capitalization would be worth over $7 TRILLION today (i.e. ten times the size of Apple).
More importantly, it completely dominated the Asian trade in the 17thand 18th centuries.
While the British East India Company is usually more famous nowadays, VOC had almost twice as many ships and moved five times more cargo than its British rivals.
The company was so successful over the long-term that it paid an astonishing 18% annual dividend to its shareholders for almost 200 years.
* * *
Given their long tradition of being financially savvy, when the Dutch do something dramatic in the financial markets, it’s important to take notice.
Which is why when the Dutch Central Bank recently announced they had just moved 122.5 tons of gold, worth $5 billion, from storage in New York back to Amsterdam everyone’s alarm bells should be ringing.
The Central Bank’s official statement itself said “this may also contribute to a positive confidence effect with the public.”
Translation: The US is not to be trusted anymore with the custody of our gold.
It’s becoming so obvious where things are headed.
It’s easy to dismiss gold repatriation when “foes” like Venezuela were doing it.
But when your own allies think you’re not to be trusted as a custodian of their gold—that’s the end of your credibility.
What does this mean to you?
The whole system that’s based on the dominance of the US dollar and the US financial institutions is in clear decline.
Governments and businesses are screaming for alternatives and some are actively pursuing them.
The US has spent the last several years debasing its currency. The Fed’s balance sheet has exploded by 529% since 2008.
The US federal government is now just hours away from hitting $18 trillion in debt.
Yet they continue to run up huge deficits, blowing their tax revenue on more bombs, drones, wars, and body scanners.
They slam foreign businesses with enormous fines (up to $9 billion) for doing business in countries the US doesn’t like.
Meanwhile they brazenly and arrogantly spy on their ‘allies’, let alone their own citizens.
Is it any wonder they have lost credibility?
Bear in mind that the US government’s power – and the dollar’s prominence – are based almost exclusively on US credibility.
Where do you think the trend for the dollar is headed when America’s own allies no longer trust the government?
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soooo, what Im hearing from this article is that apple still has a long way to climb? BULLISH
The takeaway is the Dutch lost it all.
“But the most absurd and preposterous of all, and which showed, more completely than any other, the utter madness of the people, was one started by an unknown adventurer, entitled “A company for carrying on a undertaking of great advantage, but no body to know what it is.” Were it not the fact stated by scores of credible witnesses, it would be impossible to believe that any person could have been duped by such a project. ……. Crowds of people beset his door, and when he shut up at three o’clock, he found that no less than 1000 shares had been subscribed for, and the deposits paid. He was philosopher enough to be contented with his venture, and set off the same evening for the continent. He was never heard of again.” - Charles Mackay writing about the South Sea Bubble in Extaordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. – 1841.
The Netherlands has adebt to GDP ration approaching that of the United States. It's debt is also increasing at a faster percentage rate. So..............wtf does the gold matter now?
Why must you keep lying in all of your posts? Netherlands debt/GDP is 73.5%. US debt/GDP is 101.5%
Not even close, you douchbag
The Netherlands?
Screw the Netherlands. VOC was private. Where did they invest/spend
all that 18% per year? Probably made a pile on tulips too.
"Weighed down by corruption in the late 18th century, the Company went bankrupt ...its possessions and the debt being taken over by the government of the Dutch Batavian Republic."
" it was the first company to issue stock" and apparently the first TBTF!
The truth is it IS different this time.
Dutch east india was all about real, tangable resources being exploited at the height of the global trade boom.
Now their are real, tangable resource constraints something that everyone mistakenly belives can be solved with runaway finance.
Dutch East India Company.....their "trade" included human trafficking; pretty good margins in that particular business. Sorry but I'm not impressed. The real question is how did the DEIC virtually disappear from the face of the earth nearly overnight? Where did it go? Well let's just say there are those who believe that it morphed into the Wall St banking industry. That would explain a lot, eh?
@Milton...very good point. New York was first New Amersterdam. Never thought about that connection.
Zigackly, it was loot, rape and plunder that got them their trillions and left the world in colonial ruins/chains.
Nothing great about them Builder Burgers at all.
The AU repatriation might be a tell though.
Echos my thoughts on Dutch Financial Wizardry.
Didn't they have that trouble with Tulips a while back?
That made a whole bunch of financial sense huh?
However that Gold moving around and statements about public confidence (made publicly!) mean something.
Yes but remembeit was not just the Dutch doing the looting, raping and plundering during those times.... they just did it better than anyone else doing it!
Kind of like Apple with sweatshops (Slave factories) in that they have done the best at paying off US Politicians and getting away so long with their "Suicide Factories".....
The Dutch and Apple have alot in common as I see it.....
BR, seems to me that Wall St and the slave trade are kissing cousins...Wall Street, the kick off for corporation nation and a chain-less form of slavery modulated by the lust for the almighty FRN.....well, back off to my corporate slave job for now in this "kindler and gentler" nation of ours.
Competition and a changing geopolitical landscape as the British Empire rose and took over
"...there are those who believe that it morphed into the Wall St banking industry..."
The Dutch East India Company went bankrupt in 1799, in simplest terms by having their ass kicked by the British East India Company. Investors lost their capital and all stolen land reverted to the Dutch government. Nothing to do with New York. A fitting end as the Dutch East India Company owed it's existence two hundred years earlier to kicking the Portugese trader's asses.
The Dutch West India Company was the one authorized to steal native lands in North America and eventually established trading settlements collectively known as New Netherlands. New Amsterdam at the tip of Manhattan Island was only one of those settlements. It was fashionable in the day not to claim an entire uncharted state or province as a possession of a sovereign because nobody cared. You could only 'claim' the land you could defend in a settlement enclosed by (in New Amsterdam's case) a pair of 12-foot high timber walls. The people on the other side of the wall - either natives or crazy Swedes from New Sweden - were generally trying to kill you and everyone inside. The aggressors were mostly the natives, because they didn't understand the 'gifts' of smallpox blankets and trinkets were suppose to be in exchange for permanent banishment from their historic lands. The natives would return the next spring to hunt, like they did for the last millenia, and find the smelly salt-water people still there and terribly upset by their presence once again.
The Dutch mayor of New Amsterdam eventually resorted to the time-tested and proven method of territorial security: genocide of the Hoboken and Manhattan indians. The Swedes learned to tolerate the insane Dutch and were no longer a threat. The walls were eventually removed, but the street running between them, Van der Waal Straat, remained. It was a popular place for trading merchandise and stock and was the officially designated as the place one could trade African and Indian slaves, or rent them out for short periods of time for temp labor. Interestingly enough, the New Amsterdam Waal*Mart provided the moral underpinnings of the present-day version.
The Dutch West India Company made most of their early profits by privateering - seizing and plundering Spanish and Portuguese ships. The immensely profitable slave trade came later, but the company was bankrupt by the end of it's charter in 1645, mostly due to the losses in constant wars acquiring and defending their Brazilian colony of New Holland (Recife). Versions 1.5, 2 and 3 of the West India Company each collapsed in bankruptcy, and it ceased to exist by 1800. The Dutch East India Company refused to have anyting to do with the West India Company prior to their first bankruptcy - they were two entirely separate Dutch chartered corporations.
You can credit the creation of Waal Straat as a trade center to the poorly-managed Dutch West India Company, but it took a lot of other foreign interlopers and decades for it to expand along with the great American business traditions of profiteering, collusion, cronyism, land theft, genocide, human trafficking, fraud and exploitation into present-day Wall Street.
I would have to agree with the spirit of your 'morphing' quote above, though. Same psychopaths, just taller buildings.
The West India Company traded slaves. The East India Company traded spices.
And it slowly decayed, not ' nearly overnight '. Finally ending when Napoleon invaded.
"Nathaniel's Nutmeg: Or the True and Incredible Adventures of the Spice Trader Who Changed the Course of History" is a good read...
Wow 18% for 200 years! I would have been dumb enought to throw some money at that then....but not now. I've been ZH'd
What was the PE?
18%.. fuck. Could you imagine shorting that and being the bagholder come ex-dividend?
Apple drop = CNBC panic
http://tinyurl.com/ku24gff
"The company was so successful over the long-term that it paid an astonishing 18% annual dividend to its shareholders for almost 200 years."
Fuck me.
I'm now going to go sob quietly into my beer.
And did the article ask, "What killed the company?" The answer might suprise you... (clue; it wasn't capitalism)
I don't know, but after 200 years of 18% dividends, I couldn't really complain too much if my original investment went tits-up.
Anyway, I'll bite. What finally drove them down them down?
Britain (the other east India co).
Am I right? Whatdid I win?
Probably Muslims....
...the 18% dividend?
Yeap.
The dividends distributed by the company had exceeded the surplus it garnered in Europe in every decade but one (1710–1720) from 1690 to 1760.
After the Fourth Anglo-Dutch War, the VOC was a financial wreck, and after vain attempts by the provincial States of Holland and Zeeland to reorganize it, was nationalised on 1 March 1796 by the new Batavian Republic. Its charter was renewed several times, but allowed to expire on 31 December 1799.
It also helps to be the first at something!
Doesn't help to be the first to die, loose your shirt in the market, have your draft number picked, face the guillotine. Better to say Sometimes.......
Not being critical, just a friendly spar.
Start the sentence with the ADVERB, don't end it with the ADVERB. OH CRAP! I just ended a sentence with and ADVERB!
I downvoted you because I think on ZH, those with the most downvotes show the most potential for actual thought.
-1
"Remember, it is the second mouse that gets the cheese" --someone's quote,
and remember what the money was made of back then, too. These weren't FRNs they were handing out. It was real money...
Thanks. Now I feel even worse.
Don't feel bad. They paid that divvy to the .001% not a bunch of us peasants.
"The company was so successful over the long-term that it paid an astonishing 18% annual dividend to its shareholders for almost 200 years."
Plenty of famines to support that return though. A bit like millions of Muslim refugees to support Lockheed Martin shares.
C'Mon man...
Dyncorp, Harris, L3, GenDynamics, FMC, Oshkosh, KBR and Many, Many Others also pitched in to relocate those poor folks to safer areas... Right?
They are all greatful for the opportunity to tirelessly work to make every Iraqi's every-day life better. Right?
Did anyone bother to read HOW "it paid an astonishing 18% annual dividend to its shareholders for almost 200 years."?
Hint: By 1730, the dividends began to exceed the earnings of the company.......
We repatriated some folks
OR.... people used to use knives and swords to kill each other and today they use.......... boredom. Apples and Oranges...... Today is NOT yesteryear.
and a monopoly on all trade and slavery sure don't hurt!
wait, what??? lol
How many armed drones do the dutch have? That's what I thought......
hope u guys r watching how theyre bombing the phony paper price of Silver in london and after the Globex began trading...
down 50 cents since the cash markets traded early our time...
fucking joke....
Government takeover, justified by corruption (that is corrupt government takes over corrupt company, ie; GM)... There, they fixed it into the ground instead of putting the corruption into the ground. Is history repeating itself? Again?
It would be nice to know which BIG FAMILIES back then had "Invested", on the exploitation of the ingnorant natives wherever they went.
Now they changed a little bit in tactics.
But I bet they are still around.
All our money is getting spent on bombs hardly...
The more pressing question is how the fuck is Apple worth 700B?
Appleomania....
iSheep
More valuable than the East India Company?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1s9T3v9eFY
You want to see the Greatest Metamorphosis of the Baby Boom Generation ever documented on film? Go watch "The History of the Eagles" parts 1 and 2 and watch Glenn Frey.
He IS the "Boomer Generation" - going from a dope-smokin', coke-snortin' "faux-hippy" in the 60's to a full-blown greedy fucking businessman (and willing to fuck his partners)(Meisner and Felder) by the "Farewell Tour" in 2009. He describes himself as "the leader of the Eagles" when the first #1 hit was by Randy Meisner ("Take it to the Limit")(co-written with Henley and Frey) after which he tells Randy to "Leave". Fuck Glenn Frey.
Makes me embarassed to have been born in '53.
(love Don Henley and Joe Walsh and the rest of the Eagles, though.)
"In the sixteenth century, Europe was like a bucking bronco. The attempt of some groups to establish a world-economy based on a particular division of labor, to create national states in the core areas as politico-economic guarantors of this system, and to get the workers to pay not only the profits but the costs of maintaining the system was not easy. It was to Europe’s credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born and, for all its cruelties, it is better that it was born than that it had not been. It is also to Europe’s credit that it was not easy, and particularly that it was not easy because the people who paid the short-run costs screamed lustily at the unfairness of it all. The peasants and workers in Poland and England and Brazil and Mexico were all rambunctious in their various ways. As R. H. Tawney says of the agrarian disturbances of sixteenth-century England: ‘Such movements are a proof of blood and sinew and of a high and gallant spirit… Happy the nation whose people has not forgotten how to rebel.’
The mark of the modern world is the imagination of its profiteers and the counter-assertiveness of the oppressed. Exploitation and the refusal to accept exploitation as either inevitable or just constitute the continuing antinomy of the modern era, joined together in a dialectic which has far from reached its climax in the twentieth century.
"
— Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, vol. I, p.233, 1974
Nice reminder. Thanks for that exerpt.
The Dutch are many times very intelligent. That's why their country is going down the drain. It's being taken over by drugsdealers, porn crazies, ignorance is bliss and degraded, violent muslims. A few kg of gold will not save their country.
Arrest the queens with the cloven hooves. Arrest the queen of the illuminati.
>> Translation: The US is not to be trusted anymore with the custody of our gold.
This is your interpretation, Simon, because it fits your argument. It can't be correct, though. If this had been the motivation of the Dutch to repatriate their gold, the US Gov would have delayed the transport indefinitely.
Now, read today's James Turk's interpretation: http://kingworldnews.com/kingworldnews/KWN_DailyWeb/Entries/2014/12/1_Wi...
It's exactly the opposite and, to me, it seems a lot more intelligible under the circumstances.
And to attain that valuation the Dutch plantation owners used to cut off the hands off those workers who they thought weren't working hard enough as a lesson to others. Coming to a factory near you once the NWO cements its dominance!