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Economics
Save for the Civil War, what occurred after a carpenter glimpsed a flash of yellow 150 years ago in Northern California was the biggest story of the 19th century. Richard Reinhard examines what we think we know (and don’t) about the people who made it happen.
Will the current bull market die spectacularly, a la 1929, or—as in 1974—will it strangle in weird silence?
J.P. Morgan did not have much use for either the stock market or reporters. So, when one reporter importunately asked him what the market was going to do one day, he replied, with about equal parts contempt and truth, “It will fluctuate.”
The video game turns 25 this year, and it has packed a whole lot of history in that time.
The most glamorous business of the industrial era almost always lost money. But nobody paid a steeper price than Edward Knight Collins.
When I was a child, the most magical day of the year for me was the one—usually a week or two after New Year’s—when my grandparents would leave on their annual trip to someplace warm.
Sometimes making a lot of money is a snap. And, sometimes, it’s a snare.
It is easy to make money in a bull market. Just look at the thousands of Wall Streeters who have done so in recent years, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average has broken through thousand mark after thousand mark.
With his usual furious vigor, Andrew Jackson posed a question that continues to trouble us to this day.
The alarm bells are ringing for Social Security again. That’s not exactly news; predictions of the exhaustion of its trust fund have been made before.
AT&T protected its interests with the fiercest vigilance, and thereby helped bring itself down.
When MCI, the company that broke the monopoly that AT&T had on long-distance telephony in the United States and Canada, was sold recently, it went for $22 billion. That’s not bad for an operation that, less than three decades ago, was having trouble borrowing $35,000.
When American cars ruled the world
THE CURRENT VOGUE FOR PUSHING TO SELL AMERICAN AUTOMOBILES ABROAD can certainly be called overdue. No one has seriously tried such a thing in generations.
For a little while, Stephen Girard held the future of the United States in his hands. Destiny had chosen the right man.
It is surely fortunate that only very seldom these days does the fate of a great nation lie in the hands of a single individual.
HOW A NATION BORN OUT OF A TAX REVOLT has, and especially hasn’t, solved the problems of taxing its citizens
One hundred and eight years of managing a problem that might have been solved at the outset with a single law
In the Roman army, the soldiers’ regular rations were principally in the form of large loaves of bread, each one enough for two soldiers for a day. This presented a big problem.
The man who showed Warren Buffett and thousands of others how to get rich
Andrew Carnegie once offered some free advice on how to get rich: “Put all your eggs in one basket, and then WATCH THAT BASKET.” His friend, Mark Twain, borrowed the remark, but had a bad habit of not practicing what he preached, and he was often
For sheer drama, William Durant’s career eclipses even Henry Ford’s.
During one week last summer, the stock market suddenly soured on technology stocks. Microsoft’s William S. Gates saw his fortune decline by an awesome 2.4 billion dollars.
How two bold sisters set up a business in the very citadel of masculine prerogative: 1870s Wall Street
Today, there are few areas of human activity where women are still absent. The nation’s most populous state has sent two to the United States Senate, where they sit with six others. The Supreme Court has two female justices.
Something he noticed in its showrooms kept the car from going the way of the Duesenberg and the Marmon.
Although this will come as a surprise to most academic economists, economics is one of the biological sciences. Free markets operate according to the rules that govern life itself, rules that are not always fair.
It meant that the government should run the telephone system. And there’s a reason that the word is forgotten.
The Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery in 1865, but right on into this century, sailors were routinely drugged, beaten, and kidnapped to man America’s mighty merchant marine.
William Davis, a cabinet-maker, left his home near Great Salt Lake in the Utah Territory in the mid-1870s and headed for Northern California, a fast-growing region where he hoped to earn up to six dollars a day by adapting his expertise to ship carpentry.
Not only are the good ones surpassingly rare, but two of the best are outright fakes.
Great autobiographies are few and far between. Not many of us, after all, possess the requisite talent, self-awareness, and willingness to bare our souls to the world. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that the best of them have so often come out of left field.
How one of our most enlightened business leaders became the symbol of corporate ruthlessness
If you want to know how much the world can change—and stay the same—in half a lifetime, consider the United States Defense Department, the General Motors Corporation, and the man who, 40 years ago, epitomized them both, Charles E. Wilson.
It went to Russia along with capitalism, but its greatest players worked over here.
Several million Russians learned about the downside of capitalism this summer when they were caught in a classic swindle. An outfit calling itself MMM and operating as an investment company offered fantastic returns on investments, upward of 3000 percent a year.
The mysterious apotheosis of the newspaper editor
It’s a bad sign when a company decides that, to sell its products, it needs to bundle them together with miscellaneous, unrelated goods.
When the government manipulated and misused the robber barons
Economists from Adam Smith on have written about the evils and dislocations that monopolies bring to an economy. What has been much less written about over the years, however, are the evils of monopsony.
Sewell Avery was a careful student of business history, but he learned the wrong lesson.
In 1984, IBM had the greatest after-tax profit of any company in the history of the world: $6.58 billion. Eight years later, it had the greatest corporate loss in history up to that time: $5 billion.
Running the long-lived Louisiana Lottery was as certain a moneymaker as owning the mint.
The Victorians regarded their times, quite correctly, as a great age of reform. They abolished slavery. They spread public education throughout the country. They began the march down the road to women’s rights.
Had the state-granted cartel held up, our history would have been unimaginably different.
In the early 1970s, when Wall Street was going through a particularly bad time, it actually cost more money to buy a taxi medallion—a license to own and operate a taxicab in New York City—than it did to purchase a seat—a license to trade—on the New York Stock Exchange.
A rule of thumb on executives’ salaries: They aren’t overpaid if there’d be no company without them.
If Rodney Dangerfield weren’t a comedian, he’d probably be an executive. They don’t get any respect, either.
Foreign trade, import and export alike, has been indispensable in building America from the very start, and many of our worst economic troubles have arisen when that trade wasn’t free enough.
It is not a coincidence that Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations and what would one day be the world’s wealthiest nation should both have burst upon the global scene in 1776.
The law of unintended consequences is nowhere more obvious than in the results of man-made laws. Prohibition, by eliminating demon rum, was supposed to alleviate poverty and disease. What we got was Al Capone.
Shakespeare—that master limner of the ways of kings—probed the frequent conflict between sovereigns and their heirs- apparent in Henry IV, Part I.
As any faithful reader of the old gossip columns knows, great wealth too easily acquired can be a very mixed blessing indeed.