Oil Drum Lane

There have been few people in history who have created as much havoc outside of war, and who are so little remembered as John Law, a rake, murderer, gambler, and brilliant rogue economist. He was the first to introduce paper money to Europe,  which led to the bankruptcy  of France, which in turn   gave a major leg-up to the nascent British Empire. In an era of bubbles, tulips, and other financial manias, he was the outstanding maniac.  Born in 1671, he was fortunate. His father, William, was a financier and dealer in gold. Precious metals were the linchpin of mercantilism, the dominant economic ideology of the age. An objective of trade was its accumulation. The goldsmiths had safes where people could store their gold, getting a receipt in the process. In addition, they could charge interest on loans secured on the deposited gold. Those receipts and written promises were used by some as paper money. William did well enough from all this to buy Lauriston Castle, a g...

  Schooled by Catholic nuns and priests, I was fed the full-fat hellfire and damnation diet. Death seemed remote at the time. If we went through the motions of the rituals of confession and absolution, we didn’t need to worry too much about it. It was never suggested that we could ease any residual fears by simply embracing a different religion, let alone by suggesting that we could bypass the worst consequences of our sins by buying into the notion that we lived in a computer simulation. To be clear, and so you know where I am coming from here, I now belong to the church of ‘dead means dead’, and accept that my fate is to end up as worm food and then reduced to my constituent atoms. Dead is Dead It really never occurred to young me that it was only some of the many flavours of Christianity that were into this fire and brimstone stuff. So, when I finished researching (yes, I do some) and writing up my posts on the landscapes of hell, I decided to explore both the origins of those i...

The  Rothschilds were a banking dynasty, the  Rockefellers of the Victorian era. They seemed to congregate around t he Aylesbury Vale, which became known as Rothschildshire. Now, the area is littered with their fabulous mansions. This is the story of some of them.  Their origins in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt  were far from fabulous. It was  a grindingly impoverished hellhole where, i n 1743, Amschel Moses Bower, a goldsmith by trade and aided by his formidable and capable wife Gutle,  expanded into finance as a way to make money when many other avenues were closed to Jews .  The Frankfurt Ghetto, a century later  Houses in the ghetto were not numbered, so he placed a sign of an eagle on a red shield over the door. Rothschild is German for ‘red shield’ so, later, his son Mayer adopted that as his family name. Mayer prospered and, to extend the scope of his nascent banking empire, dispatched his sons around Europe.   The Red Shield...