Rarely accorded the economic perspicacity of his contemporary and sometime antagonist Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift nevertheless offers his readers a clear vision of the rise of finance in Britain and Ireland during the first decades of the eighteenth century. This chapter opens with a section outlining the Financial Revolution of the late seventeenth century. The second section looks into Swift’s private finances and his interest in material wealth. The third section focuses on Swift’s responses to the bursting of the South Sea Bubble. And the fourth and final section focuses on the Wood’s Halfpence controversy of 1722–24, which provoked Swift’s most concentrated period of economic writing.