THE PRUDENCE OF PROJECTORS: ADAM SMITH’S PREMONITION OF FINANCIAL FRAGILITY AND THE ORIGINS OF MONETARY POLICY

For approximately a century and a half after their dramatic deflation, the South Sea and Mississippi Bubbles of 1710–1720 had discredited finance. With the exception of government bond markets and a few chartered companies, the rapid rise and fall of fortunes associated with the South Sea Company, in Britain, and the Mississippi Company in France, had made the joint stock system of corporate finance almost synonymous with fraud and financial debauchery. (The most authoritative account of these schemes is given in Murphy, 1997 .) The joint stock system of finance was seen as seriously flawed, and an indictment of the theories on credit money of the schemes’ instigator, John Law. During those one hundred and fifty years, classical political economy rose and flowered. Not surprisingly finance then came to be considered for its fiscal and monetary consequences. This pre-occupation left its mark on twentieth-century economics in an attitude that the fiscal and monetary implications of finance, eventually its influence on consumption, are more important than its balance sheet effects in the corporate sector. This attitude is apparent even in the work of perhaps the pre-eminent twentieth century critical finance theorist, John Maynard Keynes.