Cotton: When White Gold Hit Civil War Prices
In March 2011, cotton hit $2.15 per pound. That was the highest price since cotton trading began on the New York Cotton Exchange in 1870. The last time cotton was anywhere near that expensive, the American Civil War was raging and the South’s plantations had stopped producing. It took 150 years for cotton to reach those levels again. Chapter 37 of Torsten Dennin’s “From Tulips to Bitcoins” explains how a combination of floods, export bans, hoarding, and panic buying made it happen.