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Mississippi Bubble 1720: The Scottish Gambler Who Invented Central Banking — and Destroyed France — EP39 T1
Description
In 1716, a Scottish gambler and convicted murderer convinced the French government to let him create a bank. By 1720, John Law controlled France's entire money supply, its national debt, its colonial trade, and its tax collection system. Then the currency collapsed. The word millionaire — coined in France to describe those who had profited — became a term of contempt overnight.
This is the financial autopsy of the Mississippi Bubble — the proto-quantitative easing mechanism that turned France's unpayable war debt into paper money backed by colonial land in Louisiana, and produced the first documented collapse of a fiat currency system three hundred years before the term was invented. We dissect how Law was right about the mechanism and wrong about the asset, why Louisiana was a swamp, and what every modern central bank copied from his failure without fully understanding what made it fail.
Mississippi Bubble 1720 | John Law | fiat currency | paper money | France financial history | proto QE | quantitative easing | central banking history | Louisiana | colonial debt | financial autopsy | monetary collapse | sovereign debt | Banque Royale | financial history
Every collapse has a pattern. We dissect it. Layer by layer.— Financial Forensics Labs