IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/fip/fedhwp/wp-03-31.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Government equity and money: John Law’s system in 1720 France

Author

Listed:
  • Francois R. Velde

Abstract

John Law?s System was a radical restructuring of French public finances, carried out from 1716 to 1720. It involved on the one hand a conversion of the existing French public debt into something like government equity, on the other hand the replacement of commodity money with fiat money. For strategic reasons, Law supported the equity at too high a level, resulting in uncontrolled money creation. The System ended with the recreation of a public debt at, surprisingly, the same level as before.

Suggested Citation

  • Francois R. Velde, 2003. "Government equity and money: John Law’s system in 1720 France," Working Paper Series WP-03-31, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.
    • Handle: RePEc:fip:fedhwp:wp-03-31
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.chicagofed.org/digital_assets/publications/working_papers/2003/wp2003-31.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Sargent, Thomas J & Velde, Francois R, 1995. "Macroeconomic Features of the French Revolution," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 103(3), pages 474-518, June.
    2. Riley, James C. & McCusker, John J., 1983. "Money supply, economic growth, and the quantity theory of money: France, 1650-1788," Explorations in Economic History, Elsevier, vol. 20(3), pages 274-293, July.
    3. Murphy, Antoin E., 1997. "John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-maker," OUP Catalogue, Oxford University Press, number 9780198286493.
    4. Earl J. Hamilton, 1936. "Prices and Wages at Paris under John Law's System," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 51(1), pages 42-70.
    5. Garber, Peter M, 1990. "Famous First Bubbles," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 4(2), pages 35-54, Spring.
    6. Sims, Christopher A, 2001. "Fiscal Consequences for Mexico of Adopting the Dollar," Journal of Money, Credit and Banking, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 33(2), pages 597-616, May.
    7. Greif, Avner & Milgrom, Paul & Weingast, Barry R, 1994. "Coordination, Commitment, and Enforcement: The Case of the Merchant Guild," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 102(4), pages 745-776, August.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. François R. Velde, 2009. "Chronicle of a Deflation Unforetold," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 117(4), pages 591-634, August.
    2. Quinn, William & Turner, John D., 2020. "Bubbles in history," QUCEH Working Paper Series 2020-07, Queen's University Belfast, Queen's University Centre for Economic History.
    3. Bignon, Vincent & Flandreau, Marc, 2018. "The Other Way: A Narrative History of the Bank of France," CEPR Discussion Papers 13138, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
    4. Yang Hu & Les Oxley, 2017. "Exuberance in Historical Stock Prices during the Mississippi and South Seas Bubble Episodes," Working Papers in Economics 17/08, University of Waikato.
    5. James Harold, 2010. "Comment on "Immigrant Entrepreneurs in U.S. Financial History, 1775-1914" (by Thomas K. McCraw)," Capitalism and Society, De Gruyter, vol. 5(1), pages 1-6, July.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Richard S. Dale & Johnnie E. V. Johnson & Leilei Tang, 2005. "Financial markets can go mad: evidence of irrational behaviour during the South Sea Bubble," Economic History Review, Economic History Society, vol. 58(2), pages 233-271, May.
    2. Stanley Fischer & Ratna Sahay & Carlos A. Végh, 2002. "Modern Hyper- and High Inflations," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 40(3), pages 837-880, September.
    3. Du, Houyang & Guo, Ye & Liu, Xuan, 2018. "How does the timing of markets affect optimal monetary and fiscal policy in sticky price models?," Economic Modelling, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 237-248.
    4. François R. Velde, 2007. "John Law's System," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 97(2), pages 276-279, May.
    5. Leeper, E.M. & Leith, C., 2016. "Understanding Inflation as a Joint Monetary–Fiscal Phenomenon," Handbook of Macroeconomics, in: J. B. Taylor & Harald Uhlig (ed.), Handbook of Macroeconomics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 0, pages 2305-2415, Elsevier.
    6. William N. Goetzmann, 2015. "Bubble Investing: Learning from History," NBER Working Papers 21693, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    7. Yang Hu & Les Oxley, 2017. "Exuberance in British Share Prices during the Railway Mania of the 1840s: Evidence from the Phillips, Shi and Yu Test," Working Papers in Economics 17/09, University of Waikato.
    8. Hall, George J. & Sargent, Thomas J., 2014. "Fiscal discriminations in three wars," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 61(C), pages 148-166.
    9. Madarász, Aladár, 2011. "Buborékok és legendák. Válságok és válságmagyarázatok - II/2. rész. A Déltengeri Társaság [Bubbles and myths, crises and explanations II/2: the South Sea bubble]," Közgazdasági Szemle (Economic Review - monthly of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Közgazdasági Szemle Alapítvány (Economic Review Foundation), vol. 0(12), pages 1001-1028.
    10. Robert F. Bruner & Scott C. Miller, 2020. "The First Modern Financial Crises: The South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles in Historical Perspective," Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Morgan Stanley, vol. 32(4), pages 17-33, December.
    11. Quinn, William & Turner, John D., 2020. "Bubbles in history," QUCEH Working Paper Series 2020-07, Queen's University Belfast, Queen's University Centre for Economic History.
    12. Yang Hu & Les Oxley, 2017. "Exuberance in Historical Stock Prices during the Mississippi and South Seas Bubble Episodes," Working Papers in Economics 17/08, University of Waikato.
    13. Hendrickson, Joshua R. & Salter, Alexander William & Albrecht, Brian C., 2018. "Preventing plunder: Military technology, capital accumulation, and economic growth," Journal of Macroeconomics, Elsevier, vol. 58(C), pages 154-173.
    14. Leeson, Peter T., 2005. "Endogenizing fractionalization," Journal of Institutional Economics, Cambridge University Press, vol. 1(1), pages 75-98, June.
    15. Edward J. Green & Richard M. Todd, 2001. "Thoughts on the Fed's role in the payment system," Quarterly Review, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, vol. 25(Win), pages 12-27.
    16. Azariadis, Costas & Stachurski, John, 2005. "Poverty Traps," Handbook of Economic Growth, in: Philippe Aghion & Steven Durlauf (ed.), Handbook of Economic Growth, edition 1, volume 1, chapter 5, Elsevier.
    17. Sitabhra Sinha, 2006. "The Apparent Madness of Crowds: Irrational collective behavior emerging from interactions among rational agents," Papers physics/0606078, arXiv.org.
    18. Roberta Dessì & Salvatore Piccolo, 2008. "Two is Company, N is a Crowd? Merchant Guilds and Social Capital," CSEF Working Papers 202, Centre for Studies in Economics and Finance (CSEF), University of Naples, Italy, revised 12 Jul 2009.
    19. Marianna Belloc & Francesco Drago & Roberto Galbiati, 2016. "Earthquakes, Religion, and Transition to Self-Government in ItalianCities," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, President and Fellows of Harvard College, vol. 131(4), pages 1875-1926.
    20. Paulo M.M. Rodrigues & Rita Fradique Lourenço, 2015. "House prices: bubbles, exuberance or something else? Evidence from euro area countries," Working Papers w201517, Banco de Portugal, Economics and Research Department.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    France; Debts; Public; Money;
    All these keywords.

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:fip:fedhwp:wp-03-31. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Lauren Wiese (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/frbchus.html .

    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.