La structure et la stabilité des premières propositions de banque foncière chez John Law

Abstract

It has now been over two decades, yet Antoin Murphy’s discovery and publication of John Law’s hitherto unknown Essay on a Land Bank has elicited little attention. I examine the nature and stability of the banking proposals set out in that Essay. Two distinct models for the establishment of a land bank are proposed and Law attributes very different properties to them. The second proposal has important commonalties with financial developments in the USA prior to 2008 in as much as it seeks to transform a pool of mortgages into a divisible and highly liquid asset. Careful attention to the differences between these two proposals contained in the Essay sheds new light on Law’s well known Money and Trade Considered: With a Proposal for Supplying the Nation with Money which reproduces much that is said in the Essay, but does not carefully distinguish between the dynamic properties of different proposals. As a result contradictory statements appear right next to each other. Here Essay can serve as a key to understanding parts of Law’s logic in his published work, despite considerable theoretical distance between the works. Lastly the Essay suggests that Law’s conception of financial history may have misled him into thinking that he could target an unsustainably low interest rate in 1719-1720.