Millionaire
The Philanderer, Gambler, and Duelist Who Invented Modern Finance
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
On the death of France's most glorious king, Louis XIV, in 1715, few people benefited from the shift in power more than the intriguing financial genius from Edinburgh, John Law. Already notorious for killing a man in a duel and for acquiring a huge fortune from gambling, Law had proposed to the English monarch that a bank be established to issue paper money with the credit based on the value of land. But Queen Anne was not about to take advice from a gambler and felon. So, in exile in Paris, he convinced the bankrupt court of Louis XV of the value of his idea.
Law soon engineered the revival of the French economy and found himself one of the most powerful men in Europe. In August 1717, he founded the Mississippi Company, and the Court granted him the right to trade in France's vast territory in America. The shareholders in his new trading company made such enormous profits that the term "millionaire" was coined to describe them. Paris was soon in a frenzy of speculation, conspiracies, and insatiable consumption. Before this first boom-and-bust cycle was complete, markets throughout Europe crashed, the mob began calling for Law's head, and his visionary ideas about what money could do were abandoned and forgotten.
In Millionaire, Janet Gleeson lucidly reconstructs this epic drama where fortunes were made and lost, paupers grew rich, and lords fell into penury -- and a modern fiscal philosophy was born. Her enthralling tragicomic tale reveals two great characters: John Law, with his complex personality and inscrutable motives, and money itself, whose true nature even to this day remains elusive.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Gleeson's riveting biography of Law shows that market speculation was not invented with the advent of Internet startups, but has a history that goes at least as far back as the beginning of the 1700s, when Law's financial innovations made ordinary citizens rich beyond their wildest dreams. Born in Scotland, Law parlayed his talent for gambling into a substantial fortune that earned him entrance to the most prestigious courts of the early 18th century. With help from his friends in high places, he escaped from an English jail, where he had been sentenced to death for killing a man in a duel, and worked his way to France. Upon his arrival in Paris, Law met the nephew of King Louis XIV, Philippe, duc d'Orleans, who soon would assume the throne following the death of his uncle. As regent, d'Orleans was faced with a nearly bankrupt country and was eventually persuaded by Law to endorse a system of paper currency. With the regent's blessing, Law established the first French bank, and created the Mississippi Company, a conglomerate that held the trading rights to France's Louisiana territory and in which Law sold shares to the public. At first the bank, and especially the Mississippi Company, performed spectacularly; the boom it fueled made millionaires out of thousands of Frenchmen--and Law a hero. But the overheated economy, which became known as the Mississippi Bubble, soon imploded, driving Law out of France and the country back to the gold standard. With its deft evocation of 18th-century culture and its lucid description of monetary principles, Gleeson's absorbing biography is the perfect summer read for dot.com tycoons and those who aspire to be.
