INTRODUCTION A proper romance ought to pit youth against age, innocence against worldliness, and show the triumph of love over all temptation. We begin, then, with some disadvantages. Our hero is in his forties. He scorns idealism as naivete. And his domestic life has a distinctly argumentative cast. Nonetheless, this book is called a romance, and I think it is accurately named. A romance should at least have a hint of the supernatural. Here we are more lucky.

Fauns and angels are not permissible in journalism, but there are other forces in the world that hauntingly express themselves through individuals. Original ideas often appear unexpectedly in several places at once; like ghosts, they are in the air. Once such ideas begin to spread, they can have an uncanny, almost demonic effect, causing otherwise rational people to act strangely. The story that follows is a romance in exactly this sense: it traces the effect of a fantastic ideathe idea that computers will make every existing authority obsoleteas it worked through and upon the man who conjured it up. Thirty years ago a young man was featured on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. He was a pioneer of a new political movement called libertarianism. The goal of the libertarians was to abolish the government, but they did not succeed, and the young man left the United States and resettled in Europe for two decades. When he returned he upended the media business, captured the attention of millions, and seduced some of the country's most powerful financiers.

He even spoke, again, of the end of government. He was no longer a libertarian, because libertarianism was a political label, and he had become an enemy of politics. The transformation he advocated was more profound than that. He spoke of a new social life unimpeded by national borders; of communities transcending time and geography. His message was, in part, about technology, and the financial mania it precipitated resembled other incidents of hysteria that came in the wake of important inventionsrailroads, automobiles, electricity, radio. But he was not an inventor, nor even a very great businessman. He was simply a talented storyteller who offered a glimpse of a future in which all outmoded constraints would be swept aside. His success coincided with a great stock-market bubble.

How much was he to blame for it? When economic historians sort out the confusion of the last ten years, they will doubtless give some of the responsibility to administrators of the central bank who lowered interest rates at a key moment, flooding the market with cheap money that quickly found its way into stocks. But the supply of money is only one side of the story. The other side is demand. In the optimism of the bubble years, enthusiasm for the story of the digital revolution made huge speculative investments seem reasonable; this in itself caused credit to loosen. An interesting illustration of the duel engines that fuel financial bubblesloose credit and enthusiasm for a good storycan be found in the temporary success of John Law, an economist and gambler who launched the first modern bubble in the early eighteenth century. Under sponsorship of the French court, Law formed a bank that issued paper money backed by significant specie reserves. He increased confidence and credit began to flow. But that was not all he did.

Law also took control of a company with monopoly rights to settlement and trade in the Louisiana territories, and sold several waves of shares to the public. After some manipulation of currency supplies by the court and Law's bank, shares in the Mississippi Company took off. With an initial value of five hundred, Mississippi shares eventually doubled, and then ran up to ten thousand in a frenzy of speculation. In the dznouement, all were ruined. Why did investors clamor to buy shares in the Miss.