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....
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....
