All Four at Once — Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

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TEE-ECO-CD-LAW-01-M-BK T-Shirt

Piece

All Four at Once Oversized Drop-Shoulder T-Shirt

$ 2,345.00

Description

Between 1716 and 1720 Law ran France's issuing bank, the currency, the Mississippi Company and its share price all at the same time; when people asked to swap paper for metal, the metal was not there. The print is the four pieces of the mechanism.

A Author

John Law

B Subject

Bubbles

C Aesthetic

Diagram · Typographic

Exploration

A Scot convicted of killing a man in a duel convinced France that metal was a nuisance. His argument was not a swindle: paper circulates faster than gold, and an economy with more currency in motion produces more. He was right, and that is what makes the case interesting.

The problem was the stacking of offices. He founded the bank that issued the notes, ran the company that backed the notes, controlled that company's share price and was finance minister over all of it at once. Each post on its own was defensible. Together they formed a circuit with nobody outside it who could look in.

When people wanted the gold back, there was no gold. Not because anyone had stolen it, but because the system was designed so that it would never need checking.

He died in Venice playing cards. France took eighty years to accept paper money again, and even today the word for bank had to be replaced by another in French administrative language.

Details