Description: Three centuries ago, in an age when one man's vision and energy could change the world, John Law's would spark the first "boom and bust".

A Scot of striking appearance and magnetic personality, Law had an uncommon mathematical gift which he parlayed into a fortune from gambling. Escaping prison after killing a man in a duel, he arrived in Paris and turned his attention to finance. His idea was simple: if money were lent in the form of paper properly backed by assets, rather than in the traditional form of gold and silver coin, then the same money could be lent many times over. Law won royal backing to set up the first French bank to issue paper currency and established the most powerful conglomerate the world had ever seen.

So successful were Law's experiments that a new word was coined to describe the shareholders in his company: millionaire. What followed was epic drama: fortunes were made and lost, paupers grew rich, and lords fell to poverty. When the chaos finally abated, the man once feted throughout Europe and elevated to celebrity status in the world's most powerful nation had become an outcast.

With all the drama of The Professor and the Madman, Millionaire is a fascinating narrative about a crucial event in world financial history that holds uncanny relevance in our credit-based, investment-mad times.

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