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

by Thomas Levenson

In the beginning, in the 1690s, such a science of money was still very much an aspiration. But the urgency of the moment drove what was becoming a financial revolution forward, as England’s monetary officials turned to more abstract—and more complicated—ways to extract funds to spend right now by the use of new forms of credit built on “mere opinion.”