Money for Nothing: The Scientists, Fraudsters, and Corrupt Politicians Who Reinvented Money, Panicked a Nation, and Made the World Rich

by Thomas Levenson

The first bargain struck under its umbrella was a dodgy land deal—an attempted grab of Irish estates owned by supporters of the deposed Stuarts, which had been confiscated after William and Mary took the throne. The Sword Blade proprietors offered £200,000 for property in Ireland that returned rents of £20,000 a year—a bid for a very healthy 10 percent return on their money. The only problem? They didn’t have the cash. Their solution lay with that surviving charter as a joint-stock business. With that, the Sword Blade Company could create new shares in the company. In the ordinary course of business the company would sell those shares in the open market (at Jonathan’s and Tom’s and Garraway’s and the rest) to raise the funds needed for their Irish adventure. Instead, in a move that plausibly originated with Blunt himself, the new stock was to be used in a debt-for-equity swap, with shares offered for what were called army debentures, floating notes sold by the Treasury to cover the army’s petty cash needs, day by day.