Market Mayhem has been an audio series since April. Today it becomes something more. Our first full cinematic documentary is live on YouTube: the story of John Law and the Mississippi Bubble of 1720, told in eighteen minutes of period footage, real paintings, and narration built from the same research that went into the book.
This is the episode we chose to film first for a reason. Before there were meme stocks, before crypto winters, before 1929, there was a Scottish gambler with a murder conviction who talked his way into controlling the entire French economy. He printed the money, ran the national bank, owned the trade rights to half of North America, and collected the taxes. For a brief moment he was arguably the most powerful private citizen in the history of Europe.
It took less than a year for all of it to burn down.
What’s in the film
The documentary follows the full arc: the duel that made Law a fugitive, the gambling tables of Europe where he built his fortune and his theory of money, the pitch to a bankrupt France, the Banque Royale, the Mississippi Company, the share mania that invented the word millionaire, and the collapse that left France so scarred it feared paper money and central banking for generations.
One thing you will not find in the film: the trader’s lessons. Every Market Mayhem episode ends with the pattern — what the disaster teaches anyone with money in a market today. For the documentary we deliberately kept the lens on the story itself. The lessons, for this bubble and every other one we cover, live in the Market Mayhem book, which traces the same anatomy across 400 years of manias, from tulips to AI.
Why documentaries now
Some stories need to be seen. The podcast will keep running every week, and if you prefer the audio version of this story, the EP02 episode page has it in full. But the collapse of the Rue Quincampoix, the crowds outside the Banque Royale, the burning of forty thousand shares in front of the Paris crowd — those beats belong on a screen.
If the film finds an audience, it becomes the first in a documentary series. The South Sea Bubble — the disaster that ruined Isaac Newton in the same year, on the other side of the Channel — is the natural next chapter.
Watch it, and if it holds you to the end, a subscribe on YouTube genuinely decides whether the next one gets made. And tell us in the comments which disaster you want covered next.
The Complete Trader's Edge
The full Mind · Method · Money framework. 70 chapters.
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Market Mayhem
400 years of bubbles, crashes, and the pattern that keeps repeating.
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Greatest Companies
How the world's greatest companies were built — and what traders learn from them.
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