The auction where nobody bid 

The end of the tulip market is remarkably undramatic, which is part of why it is worth studying. There was no bank failure, no forced liquidation, no cascade of margin calls, because the market had none of the machinery that produces those events. What happened, in the first days of February 1637 at Haarlem, was that bulbs were offered for sale and buyers declined to bid at the going rate.

Word travelled quickly along the same tavern network that had carried the prices up. Within days sellers across the Republic found the same thing: an offer at January's price met silence. Since a price is only the point at which someone else agrees, the price structure did not fall so much as evaporate. Traders holding contracts to buy in the summer at winter prices were suddenly holding promises nobody wanted to inherit.

Why then? Historians offer several contributing factors rather than one trigger. Haarlem was suffering an outbreak of plague, which may have thinned the room and certainly disrupted normal commerce, though a plague that reduces the number of buyers can also, uncomfortably, raise the appetite for pleasure and risk among survivors. The market had also widened fast in January, drawing in participants with less money and less knowledge, which is usually the last stage of an expansion rather than the start of one. And bulbs were only months from actual delivery, which meant contracts written as a game were about to require real payment.

The honest answer is that the timing is not fully explicable, and that is the useful lesson. There is a persistent temptation to hunt for the news item that ends a boom. Often no such item exists. The condition for continuation was a steady supply of buyers willing to pay more than the last one, and conditions like that fail without notice.

What followed was months of confusion rather than ruin. Sellers demanded payment. Buyers refused, arguing the contracts were never enforceable in the first place. Growers were left with fields of bulbs and no contracted revenue. Delegates met at Amsterdam in late February, the courts of Holland declined to enforce the contracts and pushed the matter back to local mediation, and in 1638 Haarlem settled on the approach that most disputes followed anyway: a buyer could walk away by paying a small percentage of the contract price, commonly cited as around three and a half percent.

So the collapse produced very little transferred money and a great deal of broken trust between people who had traded on nothing but a signature and a shared assumption.

Which leads to the question the legend answers badly: who was actually ruined?