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Economics
History, like most aspects of human existence, has fashions that come and go. In the nineteenth century, the Great Man theory was very popular. Columbus was certain he could reach the Orient by sailing toward the setting, not rising, sun.
On a hot July night about 15 years ago, a young New Yorker on his way out for the evening decided on a quick shave. When he flicked on his electric razor, however, the lights in his apartment went out.
How we became a nation of instant, constant borrowers
In 1987, Robert Townsend charged $100,000 on his 15 personal credit cards to finance the production of a major motion picture, Hollywood Shuffle. It was a big risk, a desperate gamble that the movie would be successful and pay off the bills.
The more things change, the French are fond of saying, the more they stay the same. The French have never been exactly renowned for their respect for the free market, but nowhere is their famous proverb more true.
There is an old saying about the transitory nature of American fortunes: shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations. As Donald Trump has discovered, they can vanish a lot faster than that. But Trump is not the record holder for financial plummeting (at least not yet).
Those who believe that America’s power is on the wane look to the example of Britain’s shockingly quick collapse. But the similarities may be less alarming than they seem.
In 1987, Paul Kennedy published his eighth book, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.
In 1937, the American economy, which had been slowly rising from the depths it had reached in 1933, suddenly reversed course and sank once more.
At its roots lie fundamental tensions that have bedeviled American banking since the nation began.
Bank failure is as American as apple pie.
Arising spontaneously from the people, folktales are little windows into the collective human psyche. Most people think of them as stories concerning the long ago and the faraway. In fact, all times and places have produced them, and modern times are no exception.
Some years ago, a magazine asked J. Paul Getty to write an article to be entitled “The Secret of My Success.” Getty agreed, and, a short time later, the manuscript arrived in the mail.
It is a very old joke among real estate brokers that only three things determine the value of a parcel of land: location, location, and location. The reason the joke has been around so long, of course, is that it is mostly true.
S & L scandals, junk bonds, defaults: The pattern is familiar to anyone who knows about U.S. banking between 1830 and 1855.
My files bulge of late with stories that tell unedifying tales of cupidity and stupidity in world and national credit markets.
He excelled at business and made Macy's highly profitable. But Nathan Straus was even better at giving away his earnings to help people in need.
History abounds in ironies, and never more so than in the capriciousness with which it hands out enduring fame. Consider Senator John Sherman, Republican of Ohio. His older brother, William Tecumseh, marched through Georgia into immortality in a single autumn.
The author leads a search for hidden treasure in the amazingly complete documentary history of a California ghost town.
The road to Bodie, California turns to gravel as it meanders upward from U.S. 395 on a 13-mile climb through sagebrush to an elevation of almost 8500 feet. I paused at the crest of a hill where a small sign marked the entrance to Bodie State Historic Park.
Wherever opportunities for great wealth are concentrated, there will also be a concentration of men who make up in ambition, genius, and reckless courage what they sometimes lack in scruples.
On April 30, 1789, George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States on the balcony of New York’s Federal Hall, then serving as the new nation’s temporary capitol.
One day in the 1880s, Arthur T. Hadley, the distinguished American economist who would later be president of Yale University, was visiting his lawyer’s office on Broad Street near the New York Stock Exchange.
In 1820, their daily existence was practically medieval; 30 later, many of them were living the modern life.
It is a commonplace that the American Revolution determined the political destiny of the country. Far less noted is the fact that the revolution’s consequences, profound as they were, had little, if any, impact on the daily existence of most Americans.
Asked how he had managed to acquire his vast fortune, Commodore Vanderbilt is supposed to have replied, “I seen my opportunities and I took ‘em.” As always, Vanderbilt’s perspicacity was far ahead of his grammar, and he had put his finger directly on capitalism’s secret weapon.
William Henry Vanderbilt (1821–85), president of the New York Central and numerous other railroads, was a quiet, honest, modest, and, above all else, moderate man.
It cannot be measured in dollars alone. It involved a kind of personal power that no man of affairs will ever have again.
On the night of Thursday, October 24, 1907, nearly every important banker in New York was meeting in J. P. Morgan’s exquisite private library, located next to his house at the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and Thirty-sixth Street.
It wasn’t enough for Woolworth that his monument be grand and useful and beautiful. He wanted it to be profitable, too.
Ever since technology began to permit it, men of power have sought immortality in stone. Knowing that their deeds, however important, were ephemeral in the nature of things, they hoped that their tombs and statues and palaces might remind the world of their greatness.
Why do you need so much money to be rich nowadays? It’s a question that historians and readers of history have always found difficult to answer.
L.P.
What happened to all the great 19th-century fortunes?
In the story “Silver Blaze,” the clue that most interested Sherlock Holmes was the dog that didn’t bark in the night. In reading the latest Forbes list of the four hundred richest Americans, I was most impressed by the names that weren’t there.
Steamboat competition was about more than speed.
If the Olympic Games demonstrate anything, it is that the urge to be the fastest lies deep in the human soul. And from the earliest days of humankind this urge has had its practical rewards beyond mere glory. The fastest caveman, after all, caught the most gazelles.
In June 1984, I got an odd call from an editor at The Wall Street Journal. I had submitted an article that marked the 100th anniversary of the first publication of Charles Dow’s stock-market average.
Random Reminiscences of Men and Events, the autobiography of John D.
It is an old joke in my family that my mother, the daughter of an immigrant tailor, never met a family poorer than her own until she met my father, who was lucky to get out of Germany in 1934 with the skin on his back.