Verwirrung der Verwirrungen.

Second edition of Penso de la Vega’s Confusión de Confusiones a work the author describes as being a series of "curious dialogues between an incisive philosopher, a discreet merchant, and an erudite stockbroker, describing the business of trading in stocks and shares, its origin and terminolgy, the reality, the game, and the chaos." Penso's Confusión is the first book to theoretize, describe, and define the operations of the Stock Market. The title alludes to the author’s view of market fluctuations that “the more one studies their mutations, the less one understands them.” The Stock Market was a new phenomenon, invented to fund the Dutch East and West India Companies, and not yet well-understood - witness the catastrophic tulipomania here described. The work was first published in its original Spanish, in Amsterdam in 1688, and then not again until 1919 in this German edition, with 32-page introduction and translation by Otto Pringsheim. A Dutch translation followed in 1939 and an English abridgement was published by the Harvard Business School in 1988. Now established as not only the first but also the classic treatment of the subject, it appeared in an unabridged English translation in 1996. Joseph Penso de la Vega (1650-1692) was one of the foremost writers and thinkers among the Spanish and Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam and their literary scene.