The True Story of a philanderer, gambler, murderer . . . and the father of modern finance.
Three centuries ago, in most Western countries, wealth was stored and exchanged in the form of gold and silver coins, and there was rarely enough of it to finance the extravagances of kings, let alone the expansion of industry and trade. At the beginning of the eighteenth century a remarkable figure stepped onto the stage of world financial history. He was John Law, an Edinburgh Scot with a mathematical gift amounting to genius.
John Law arrived in Paris with an idea. If money were lent in the form of paper, properly backed by assets, then the same money could be lent several times over. Law won royal backing to set up the first French bank to issue paper currency. What followed was epic drama; fortunes were made and lost, paupers grew rich and lords fell into penury. The eighteenth-century innovations of John Law were to predict the credit economy we all take for granted today.
