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

by Thomas Levenson

With such tangible evidence of new money visible to anyone in London, Exchange Alley grew ever more irresistible, to the point that its narrow passages became a kind of carnival of money—as depicted in the satirical poem “A South Sea Ballad”: “Our greatest Ladies hither come, / And ply in chariots daily / Oft pawn their Jewels for a sum / And venter’t in the Alley.”

As those in the stock gamboled in the South Sea surf, others, equally enterprising, trolled for them. There is always more than one way to make money off a boom, and few hunting grounds have been as filled with targets as those few streets and passages in London during that South Sea spring. Pickpockets worked in groups of three or four: one to distract the target, while the real artist of the gang—a nip, who cut purses, or the yet more skilled foyne, who could dip into the inner pocket of a coat—made off with the mark’s purse.

More cautious or more canny people took care of their paper fortunes by transforming them into something much more tangible. Land, the ultimate measure of wealth in eighteenth-century Britain, saw its own boom.

In quieter times, productive real estate went for about twenty times the revenue it could generate each year. The Company’s new rich paid from twenty-nine to thirty-seven times real estate’s annual income—at the most extravagant, almost double what the same property would have cost a few months earlier.

In an echo of the flood of new companies that had hit the Exchange in the 1690s, and again in the next decade, some of the new ventures were led by gamblers, or sometimes mere swindlers searching for yet bigger fools.

Anderson was describing those who were buying into what were called “bubble companies”—projects launched as the booming stock market created both new investors and an appetite for anything that seemed like easy money.

On June 17, King George graciously made the shoemaker’s son a baronet, a title that survives to this day. Sir John, as he was henceforth known, received wildly extravagant praise from much less exalted quarters too. Nicholas Amhurst, expelled from St. John’s College, Oxford, in 1719, was trying to make a living with his pen as both a poet and a political polemicist. In July 1720, he tried a familiar trick, publishing a poem of praise aimed at getting in on a good thing: his “Epistle to Blunt” is testimony to the public’s enthusiasm in the glorious adventure that, as of its writing, had been running for three months.