Bubbles, tulips, booms and busts: same story, different dates

Perhaps one of the most cheering moments of 2012 was when SirMervyn King summoned Barclays chairman Marcus Agius and told him that after the appalling revelations about Libor-fixing, the bank's chief executive Bob Diamond would have to go – or, as the Sun headline had it: "Sign on, You Crazy Diamond."

Both King's high moral tone and the headline-writers' cheek seemed refreshingly modern – but for anyone wandering the damp streets of London with half an hour or so to kill during this festive season, a corner of the British Museum offers a healthy dose of historical perspective on these and many other events over the past torrid five years.

Tucked away in Room 69a, just around the corner from a display of Roman pottery, is a small temporary exhibition dedicated to "Bubbles and Bankruptcy: Financial Crises in Britain Since 1700".

One exhibit is a cartoon from Punch, published after the Bank of Englandbailed out Barings (yes, that Barings) in 1890. A stiff-looking woman with an apron made of banknotes – the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street – crossly hands out cash to a queue of cowed financiers, saying: "You've Got Yourself into a Nice Mess With Your 'Speculation'!" It must be reassuring for King to regard himself as today's incarnation of that starchy matron.

It's also salutary – and somehow comforting – to see artefacts from the events of the recent crash boxed up in glass cases as historical exhibits: an empty champagne bottle from the flotation of the ill-fated Northern Rock; a Steve Bell cartoon of ravenous fat cats having their toenails gingerly clipped by George Osborne; and a handful of credit cards from the bailed-out banks.

These now-poignant objects sit alongside exhibits illustrating a bevy of other investment frenzies and financial crises: the South Sea bubble, tulip mania and the railway investment boom – and bust – of the mid-19th century.

Apart from the facile (but nonetheless true) insight that there's nothing new under the sun, the exhibition holds one or two other lessons for today's policymakers.

The first is that these boom-bust events tend to follow a classic arc: a tale with a grain of truth in it is seized on and peddled to credulous investors by an unholy alliance of greedy optimists and downright swindlers.

An engraving in one case shows a certain Gregor MacGregor, a dashing-looking Scottish general who went off to Latin America and came back claiming to have discovered a lush territory called Poyais. He raised an extraordinary £200,000 – detailed in minute letters on a loan document on display – from investors convinced by the tale of vast, untapped riches in a faraway colony.

Unfortunately for MacGregor and the hundreds of would-be settlers who believed his tale and boldly set out across the Atlantic from Leith, Poyais turned out to be largely uninhabitable, and his backers lost their money.

Anyone reading the wild predictions about the potential riches to be made from exploiting shale gas deposits in the US should recognise the ring of a story so compelling that, given enough time, it could easily become a vast investment bubble. Fortunes will be made, but also lost.

A share certificate from the Sheffield and Retford Bank is a reminder that when Britain's railways arrived, they certainly transformed the economy and created millionaires; but many of the early firms set up to drive brand-new lines across great tracts of the country went bust. The Sheffield and Retford made many loans to these companies. When they defaulted, the bank failed.

Some of the items on display also highlight the way that Britain's political and social elites have always been prone to being seduced by smooth-talking investors. An 18th-century ballad, the Bubblers Medley, printed at the time of the South Sea crash, talks of the "Stars and Garters" tempted into the scheme alongside "harlots" from Drury Lane.

However, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling should note that while the then chancellor of the exchequer, John Aislabie, did buy shares in the South Sea company, he shrewdly sold them before the crash – as visitors can see from the bill with his signature – making them over to some more gullible citizen.

When veteran bank-watcher Sir Donald Cruickshank appeared before the parliamentary commission on banking standards recently, he also called for some historical perspective, urging its members to immerse themselves in a copy of Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now.

Reading the rip-roaring adventures of shady financier Augustus Melmotte, who takes London by storm with his eye-watering wealth, drawing politicians and aristocrats into his net, it's hard not to think of the charming chancers in charge of Britain's banks, who convinced us (and themselves) they were financial geniuses before the crisis – and were revealed to be self-deluded at best.

True, Melmotte certainly wouldn't resort to the vulgar "done ... for you big boy" tone of the emails that surfaced in the Barclays Libor settlement, but the sentiment is similar. Or, as Cruickshank put it: "I don't think bankers are any worse than they have been before: they always calibrate off society … We have been here before."