p. 55 “In 1237, the bankrupt Latin government of Constantinople mortgaged Christ’s crown of thorns to a syndicate of Venetian and Genoese merchants for a loan of 13,134 bezants, or iperiperi (coins of African gold)… The relic was despatched to Venice but was redeemed by that pious monarch Louis IX of France. On August 18, 1239, it was borne in triump through the streets of Paris, the King himself leading the procession , barefoot and in his shirt. To house the crown and other relics, St Louis built to famous chapel in Paris known as the Sainte-Chapelle at a cost of 20,000 marks.”
p. 58 End of feudalism “For Georg Simmel, the greatest German philosopher of money, writing in about 1900, that was the magic moment of human emancipation… “The lord of the manor who can demand a quantity of beer or poultry or honey thereby determines the activity of the latter in a certain direction. But the moment he imposes a merely amoney levy the peasant is free, in so far as he can decide whether to keep bees or cattle of anything else.”… Yet even within the world of money, the tenant is still liable to his lord if he fails in his money payments. Final liberation comes, Simmel believed, when all the payments in a foreseeable future are rolled into one payment, a process known as capitalisation… Those who cannot free themselves lose even the thgreadbare protection of feudal reciprocity. Eventually, in England for example, they may be evicted from the common land by a provcess known as enclosure.”
p. 127 The word millionaire, which is French, was invented in the open air in a little street near what’s now the Centre Beauborg in Paris known as the Rue Quincampoix or Quincenpoix in the autumn of 1719. That it was not admitted by the Academie Francaise until 1762 merely shows the caution of that body. It is the legacy to the language of the world of a moment when the world turned and of the master and instigator of that manouevre, M. Quincampoix himself, the Schotsman John Law of Lauriston.”
p. 131 “”In the memoires of the Duc de Saint-Simon we can see Law flattering the vain old thing much more clearly than Saint-Simon himself. Law finally captures the duke by financing the purchase for the French regalia of an Indian diamond “the size of a greengage” then being hawked around Europe at a price of two million livres. (It is now in the Louvre.” With the collapse of the System in May 1720 and the death of the Regent three years later, the rentiers that Law despised were restored. French finance fell into the hands of his business rivals and his reputation into those of Montesquieu and Voltaire, who disapproved of him. Law’s ideas languished until thtey were revived in the asignats and the mandats of the National Assembly; the enthusiasm of 1790 produced an excellent edition of Law’s writings… but the hyperinflation of the assignats had its reaction in Bonaparte, whose mind was closed to credit and, with his sanguinary conquests and pictereqsque titles was everything Law was not; he sold Louisiana to the Americanms for four cents an acre; an oceanic discount to the future earnings of the Mississippi basin.”
p. 138 At some point, he gains a partner, a certain Lady Catherine Knollys, who left her gusband for him. Of her surivivng portraits, that in Het groote Tafereek sgiws a cery handsome woman in a tricorn gat captioned with a corase riddle … “Je suis ni epouse, ni veuve,,, She bore Law two children, but they never married, even after her husband died: when the scandal became public at the fall of the System, the Refent cancelled the annuities Law had bought for her and the children and left her destitute.”
p. 164 “The English and French literature of the 19th century gives an impression of stability, even smugness, in the social order. In 1888, Kipling wrote in “The Education of Otis Yeere” “All good people know that a woman is the only infallible thing in the world, except Government Paper of the ’79 issue, bearing interest at four and a half percent.” .. confidence in money, in the form of British Consols, reached its peak in 1896. Two years later, the West Shore Railroad in Chicago issued 4 per cent bonds maturing in AD 2361: in other words, the bond buyers assumed money had been made eternal. At which point, it fell to bits.”
p. 173 In 1906 my grandfather, though still a young man, gave his siste Anna an allowance of £100 a year. It had an effect he hadn’t foreseen. The next year, Anna went to India, wrote a novel and supported herself and several other people from her royalties for the rest of her life.”
p. 176 – the invisible hand – In Defore’s Moll Flanders, printed in 1722, it is aeupemism for for ill-luck or retribution “an almost invisible Hand that blasted all my Happiness. In Smith’s first use of t he phrase, in his juvenile History of Astronomy, it is the supernatural agency to which primitive people attribute irregular or alarming natural phenomena. By 1759, when Smith published The Theory of Moral Sentiments, that malign and unpredictable force has become the good god of the Stoics, who has arranged the universe fo that all events, even the most alarming, work towards the prosperity and perfection of the whole … Fourteen years later, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith’s wonderful machine is promoting GDP… How soothing to ruthless minds and bad commercial consciences… converted the self-serving business slogans of the 17th-century City into a creed.
p. 178 “In the two centuries after Smith, more mental effort was wasted on objectifying his system of belief than on any other in history, not excluding the immortality of the soul and the rentability of civilian nuclear power.”
p. 180 Such is the prestige of mathematics, and the charm of talk about money, that the economists have imposed their arithmetic on the world. Though, in their own existences, most people recognise that money and happiness or not co-terminous: yet they will accept whatever money quantities are fashionable with the economists – national product, balance of payments, consumer price indices or wahetever – as measures of national welfare; and because those sums, being sums, have a technically rational sound about them, people forget there are other goals of national, as there are of individual, aspiration. That the economists can’t measure any of their quantities even to their own satisfaction, can explain neither prices not the rate of interest and cannot even agree what money is, reminds us that we deal here with belieg not science.”
P. 278 “Money, far from being the harmless arena of human emulation as its apologists hold, is a great destroyer. Because money is eminent desire, there is no satisfaction in the external world unless it is conveyed in money, until the world is possessed in monetary garb … Columbus sucked a thousand years of gold from the Caribbean in two or three, and then extinguished all of its human life. The Conquest he not so much inaugurated as carried to the New World now ranges all over the globe, including its polar regions. Woods are paved, mountains mined, seas eaten, species annihilated. All the large land and sea animals of the weather and most of its birds, are under sentence of extinctions. They are being killed not by the rifle, but by a more lethal invention, money.”
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