In November 1857 there was complete panic among Hamburg’s merchants. The economic crisis that had rocked the US in the past few months was looming ominously. In the previous years, things had taken a steep turn for Hamburg. The port city on the Elbe had developed into the center of trade between the Old and New World; In the Hamburg trading offices, several nerve strands of world trade converged. And the banks on the Elbe provided the necessary liquidity.
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The pepper sacks, as the Hamburg merchants were called, cultivated worldwide contacts. There was gambling on the stock exchanges, with merchants filling their warehouses in the hope of rising prices and higher profits. Loans reached staggering heights.
But now everything threatened to collapse. What has now rolled out is astonishingly similar to the banking crisis that began in 2007, when a real estate bubble burst in the USA and the collapse of the Lehman Brothers financial institution pulled first the banks and then the global economy into its vortex.
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