• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 693 0

of dollars move around the world. But time’s passage has seemingly brought little in the way of additional invulnerability to the giant institutions public investment has created. Even with regulators, central bank reserves, and eons of experience, stock exchanges, banks, and economies still collapse and threaten the stability of those elsewhere. The economic cycle, which our forebears probably thought of as the wheel of fortune, has in recent history resulted in the meteoric rise and collapse of the Asian economies, Russia’s financial breakdown, and uncertainty surrounding the fate of China and Brazil. In the world of banking and finance the specter of financial calamity looms as intimidatingly as ever it did to investors in Regency Paris or in Georgian London. Maverick financiers can still rock governments, financial landslides on telephone-number scale still happen. The financial chicanery of junk bond guru Michael Milken dominated the speculative world of the 1980s during the boom years, but the market in junk bonds collapsed after his conviction and imprisonment. Under the direction of the Federal Reserve, the ill-fated Long-Term Capital Management was bailed out by leading investment banks in order to avert losses estimated at $14 trillion—more than enough to destabilize markets throughout the world.

Similarly, speculation contagion still periodically infects vast swaths of society. As in the days of the Mississippi, equities are no longer an elitist investment. Nowadays anyone with money invested in a pension, a tax-exempt savings plan, a mutual fund, or a savings-and-loan account is likely to have a vested interest in the stock market, and to feel, directly or indirectly, the effect of huge spikes and falls in stock prices. Recently, speculation fervor has fantastically bubbled Nasdaq Internet company shares.

Most amazingly of all, the driving force that causes the swell and burst of bubbles seems little altered. Within our high-tech information-technology universe, the hunch remains as much a part of the pundit’s repertoire as ever, the herd instinct if anything more able to effect terrifying vacillations in markets. Monetary utopia, John Law would be amazed to see, remains as elusive as ever.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following friends and experts, many of whom have patiently shared their knowledge and read and commented on early drafts of the book: Nicholas Carn of Alliance Capital; Antoin Murphy of Trinity College, Dublin; David Bowen; Virginia Hewitt, Lorna Goldsmith and Dr. Barrie Cook in the Coins and Medals Department at the British Museum; Dr. Francis Harris, Department of Manuscripts at the British Library; Professor Walter Eltis, Exeter College, Oxford; Sophie Angonin, CICL; Guy Holborn, Librarian, Lincoln’s Inn; Gavin Kealey QC; Christine Battle; Al Senter; staff at the Bank of England Museum, especially John Keyworth; Amanda Straw, curator of the Knowsley Estate; Jacob Simon at the National Portrait Gallery; stock market historian David Schwartz; Peter Furtado at History Today; Dr. Munro Price, Department of European Studies, University of Bradford; Dr. Peter Campbell, Department of European Studies, University of Sussex; staff at the Bibliothèque Méjanes, Bibliothèque Nationale, Public Record Office, West Hill Library, the London Library, the British Library, the Heinz archive at the National Portrait Gallery; my enthusiastic and encouraging publishers at Simon & Schuster, especially Airié Dekidjiev; literary agent sans pareil Chris Little; and my husband Paul Gleeson, whose career in the financial markets helped spark my fascination with John Law in the first place.

SOURCES

Law has long attracted the attention of biographers and economic historians. Many of his most important writings have been published by Paul Harsin in Les Oeuvres complètes de John Law. The earliest biography of John Law was published in 1721 by W. Gray; the first detailed biography written after his death was that by J. P. Wood, written in 1824. Law’s financial activities were recounted by