IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/elg/eechap/21454_4.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

John Law (1671-1729): the financial engineer as social engineer

In: The Political Economy and Feasibility of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies

Author

Listed:
  • .

Abstract

The brilliant Law revived the ancient theory that money is essentially a convention; fractional reserve banks may be backed by land, the value of which is its discounted expected future earnings; or a financial enterprise such as the Mississippi company; or be pure sovereign fiat money. Credit itself may be used as money. Expansionary monetary and fiscal policy may increase a nation's economy, population, and military power; contractionary austerity policies the opposite. His work suggests the need to clearly separate out the categories of rental, sale, and financial asset pricing; the value of money based upon financial asset prices will be extremely unstable. It supports bitcoin and cryptocurrencies by suggesting the possibility of new forms of money such as private fiat money; yet, it suggests that the supply of money is much too important to be left to private entrepreneurs.

Suggested Citation

  • ., 2022. "John Law (1671-1729): the financial engineer as social engineer," Chapters, in: The Political Economy and Feasibility of Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies, chapter 4, pages 35-74, Edward Elgar Publishing.
    • Handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:21454_4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.elgaronline.com/view/9781803920931.00010.xml
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Economics and Finance;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:elg:eechap:21454_4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Darrel McCalla (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.e-elgar.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.