This is Planet Money from NPR.

For the last few years, I've been working on a book.

It's about the history of money.

It's called Money, the true story of a made up thing.

It's just coming out now.

And one of the things I found really striking as I was working on it doing the research was

when you look back at the long arc of the history of money, you see these long periods

of time when everything is just stable.

Things aren't changing much.

And then there are these moments when everything just goes like bananas.

And you see these massive dramatic changes in a really short period of time.

Jacob, I read your book and one of my favorite parts in the book was one of these moments.

It happened a few hundred years ago in Western Europe when the modern economy and modern

finance were just beginning to emerge.

There is this one person who comes along at this moment, his name is John Law, and he

picks up all these little pieces, all these innovations, and puts them together almost single

handedly.

And kind of out of nowhere, John Law creates this entire economy that looks a lot like

the world we live in today.

You got to start where everybody starts.

This is Steve Quinn.

He's an economic historian who I talked to when I was working on the book.

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