John Law and the Mississippi Bubble

This is not at all what I expected. It tells of the crumbling economy of France and efforts to get it back on track. A man named John Law had the solution, but he couldn't overcome the stupidity of the Prince Regent who just wanted to cash in himself. The characters are wonderful and colorful and the story is excellent.

It's an economics lesson by Richard Condie on the Mississippi Bubble, that wonderful, brief period in French history when Scottish economist (so he claimed) John Law convinced the king of France that he could solve all his money problems by means of paper money, and letting people buy shares in a company to exploit France's territory in Louisiana (I.e., the basin of the Mississippi River). Like most economics propounded by cartoon characters with bagpipes, it worked - or seemed to - for a short rime, and then crashed magnificently.

If the thought of this marvelous nonsense interests you, it forms a chapter in McKay's EXTRAORDINARY DELUSIONS AND THE MADNESS OF CROWDS. It's the chapter just before they did the same thing again, only in England. And nothing like it has happened since, unless you count when Jay Gould tried to corner gold in 1869, the stock market crash of 1929, the Internet Bubble of the 1990s, the market crash of 2008, the....