{"id":37146,"date":"2018-08-30T06:37:20","date_gmt":"2018-08-30T11:37:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37146"},"modified":"2018-08-30T06:37:20","modified_gmt":"2018-08-30T11:37:20","slug":"john-law-300-years-on","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=37146","title":{"rendered":"John Law–300 Years On"},"content":{"rendered":"
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JOHN LAW \u2013 300 YEARS ON<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n
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Most people are aware that historically there have been speculative bubbles. Some of them can even name a few \u2013 the South Sea bubble, tulips, and more recently dot-coms. Some historians can go even further, quoting the famous account by Charles Mackay of the South Sea bubble, the tulip mania and the Mississippi bubble, published in the mid-nineteenth century.<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most valuable bubble empirically for the purpose of our elucidation has to be the Mississippi bubble, whose central figure was John Law. Law, a Scotsman whose father\u2019s profession was as a goldsmith and banker in Edinburgh, set up an inflation scheme in 1716 to rescue France\u2019s finances. He proposed to the Regent for the infant Louis XIV a scheme that would be based on a new paper currency.<\/p>\n

Law was a somewhat louche character, who in his Continental travels had spent his mornings studying finance and the principles of trade, and the evenings in the gaming-houses of Europe. He was a successful gambler, because of his ability to calculate odds.<\/p>\n

Some similarities with the personality of Keynes two hundred years later are striking. Keynes was a mathematician first, and an economist second. Their approach was also similar: see a problem and try to find a solution, instead of seeing a problem and trying to understand why it existed before solving it. Both Law and Keynes felt that sound money was too restrictive for the enhancement of an economy.<\/p>\n

Consequently, much of what Law proposed and then enacted in France rhymes with our neo-Keynesian world today. The difference, perhaps, is that when given the opportunity Law seized it, and had ultimate financial and monetary power. He harnessed the roles of a central bank, monopolist in international trade, stock promoter and finance minister.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

JOHN LAW \u2013 300 YEARS ON Most people are aware that historically there have been speculative bubbles. Some of them can even name a few \u2013 the South Sea bubble, tulips, and more recently dot-coms. Some historians can go even further, quoting the famous account by Charles Mackay of the South Sea bubble, the tulip […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5828,10995,7380,281,333,3676,21437,7617,13060,4948,14883,21435,21436],"class_list":["post-37146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-alisdair-macleod","tag-charles-mackay","tag-cobden-centre","tag-europe","tag-france","tag-john-law","tag-louse-xiv","tag-mises-institute","tag-mississippi-bubble","tag-paper-currency","tag-south-sea-bubble","tag-speculative-bubbles","tag-tulips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":37147,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37146\/revisions\/37147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}