![a tower stands in the background while angels fly above. In the foreground men trade stocks- ignoring the two seemingly dead men and the one plummeting to his death from a second story window](/sites-drupal/default/files/styles/max_scale_640x640/public/field_ers_item_record_image/2022-08/tower%20of%20babel.jpg?itok=Y3zHUiwq)
The Tower of Babel of the Confused Stockholders
Anonymous, 1720, Etching and engraving
“The wind trade is very much like the Tower of Babel, as these fools would climb it into the sky; many a one, however, fell down.” As if taking his cue from these lines of the poem that appears below, a well-dressed man jumps headlong from a building at left, en route to his death on the hard ground below. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and this man has lost his money—and his mind—to the noxious financial schemes that John Law and his followers cooked up. Indifferent to the figure’s fate, the financiers at right, including Law himself, sell poisonous little cakes inscribed with words like “smoke,” “wind,” and “bad shares.”
: Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs
The New York Public Library believes that this item is in the public domain under the laws of the United States, but did not make a determination as to its copyright status under the copyright laws of other countries. This item may not be in the public domain under the laws of other countries.