Various, 1720 to present
The Mississippi Bubble of 1720 was the first time I watched a modern financial system collapse under its own invented certainty. John Law’s system was genuinely sophisticated for its time: it attempted to decouple value from gold and anchor it instead to the productive capacity of a territory. The theory was not absurd. The implementation was catastrophic. When confidence in the system wavered, the system ceased to exist, because confidence was the only thing the system was actually made of.
I was in Paris during parts of the collapse. The specific thing I remember is how quickly the faces of the people who had been confident changed. Not gradually: in hours, sometimes. The confidence that had been so complete and so apparently solid simply evacuated, and what was left was the face of someone who could no longer access the certainty they had been living inside.
I watched the same face in 1929. In 2008. In smaller iterations across the centuries in between. The face is always the same: the moment when the person realizes that the thing they believed was solid was paper, and the paper has been in contact with fire for longer than they knew, and the fire has been burning since before they arrived.
Paper kingdoms. The geometry of financial collapse has not evolved since 1720. Only the speed of the burning has increased. The Geometry of Ruin. May 22.