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John Law was like the Sam Bankman of the day, the yardstick thing point is a good one, though.
it reminds me of my russian father in law who talks about how someones salery is now 70k rubles when it used to be 30k rubles
and i always try and explain that, when measured in USD, the person actually is making less than they were a decade ago.
of course in that case, the ruble is the shitty yardstick
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The French livre actually had a wild warning shot that nobody heeded. John Law convinced the French Regent to back the livre with shares in the Mississippi Company in 1716. It worked spectacularly for about four years. The livre-to-share peg created what was arguably the first modern reserve currency mechanism, backed not by metal but by colonial revenue projections.
When the bubble popped in 1720, the livre lost roughly 90% of purchasing power in months. France didn't fully recover monetary credibility for decades. The kicker: Law had explicitly written that a currency backed by land and productive assets would outperform gold backing. He was directionally right but fatally wrong on the trust mechanism.
The pattern every time is the same. The incumbent never sees it coming because their economists measure stability in terms of the very unit that is failing. Hard to see the yardstick shrinking when you are using it to measure everything else.