Economic

A speculative bubble in Dutch tulip bulb prices that collapsed in February 1637. At its peak, single...

A British stock bubble centered on the South Sea Company, granted a monopoly on trade with South Ame...

A financial bubble in France engineered by John Law, a Scottish financier. Laws Mississippi Company ...

The first major peacetime financial crisis in United States history. The panic followed the War of 1...

A financial crisis that touched off a major recession lasting until 1842. The panic was triggered by...

A financial crisis triggered by the collapse of overextended railroad investments. The panic began i...

A severe economic depression triggered by the failure of the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad and t...

A stock market crash triggered by the fight for control of the Northern Pacific Railway between E H ...

A financial crisis triggered by a failed attempt to corner the copper market. The panic caused bank ...

The most devastating stock market crash in American history. After a decade of speculation known as ...

The largest one day percentage decline in stock market history. On October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones f...

A speculative bubble in internet and technology stocks from 1995 to 2000. The NASDAQ rose 400 percen...

The worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, triggered by the subprime mortgage market col...

On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones plunged nearly 1,000 points in minutes, then recovered most of the los...

The fastest bear market in history, triggered by the COVID 19 pandemic. From February 19 to March 23...

The second largest bank failure in US history. Silicon Valley Bank, which served tech startups, coll...

In January 2021, retail investors on the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets drove GameStop stock from 20 ...

In October 2008, Volkswagen briefly became the most valuable company in the world during a massive s...

A speculative bubble in British railway shares in the 1840s. Parliament authorized 8,000 miles of ne...

A period of intense land speculation during the Parliamentary Enclosure Acts from 1750 to 1860. Comm...

A real estate bubble in Florida in the 1920s. Land that sold for 800 per acre was flipped for 20,000...

On March 27, 1980, the Hunt brothers attempt to corner the silver market collapsed. Nelson Bunker Hu...

A financial crisis that started in Thailand and spread across East Asia. On July 2, 1997, Thailand w...

One of the largest asset bubbles in history. Japanese real estate and stock prices reached extraordi...

India faced a severe balance of payments crisis in 1991. Foreign exchange reserves fell to just 3 we...

A massive stock market crash in China after a debt fueled boom. The Shanghai Composite Index rose 15...

A sovereign debt crisis that threatened the eurozone. In October 2009, Greece revealed its budget de...

The UK voted to leave the EU on June 23, 2016. The pound fell 10 percent overnight, its largest one ...

The day Britain crashed out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. George Soros bet 10 billion aga...

The Federal Reserve launched quantitative easing in November 2008, buying 600 billion in mortgage ba...

A multi year crisis that threatened the eurozone. After Greece revealed its massive deficit, attenti...

OAPEC proclaimed an oil embargo against nations supporting Israel during the Yom Kippur War. Oil pri...

The second oil shock, triggered by the Iranian Revolution. Oil production in Iran collapsed, and pri...

FTX, once the second largest cryptocurrency exchange, collapsed in November 2022. Founder Sam Bankma...

A land speculation frenzy in the Mississippi Territory and Alabama in the early 1800s. Settlers and ...

A speculative frenzy in American canal companies in the 1820s. The success of the Erie Canal, comple...

A period of rampant speculation and corruption in post Civil War America. Railroad magnates like Jay...

A decade of economic boom and stock market speculation from 1920 to 1929. The Dow rose from 63 in 19...

A sharp economic downturn during the Great Depression, caused by premature fiscal tightening. Presid...

The failure of 1,043 out of 3,234 savings and loan associations in the United States. S and Ls had b...

Long-Term Capital Management was a hedge fund founded in 1994 with two Nobel Prize winning economist...

The Eurozone crisis lasted from 2010 to 2014. It started with Greece, then spread to Ireland, Portug...

Argentina defaulted on 93 billion dollars of debt in December 2001, the largest sovereign default in...

Russia defaulted on 40 billion in domestic debt on August 17, 1998. The ruble was devalued from 6 to...

Enron, once the seventh largest company in America, filed for bankruptcy on December 2, 2001. The co...

WorldCom, a major telecommunications company, filed for bankruptcy in July 2002 after revealing 3.8 ...

Lehman Brothers filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, the largest bankruptcy filing...

Bernie Madoffs Ponzi scheme, revealed in December 2008, was the largest financial fraud in history. ...

A massive rally in artificial intelligence stocks starting in 2023. Nvidia, the leading AI chip make...

A phenomenon starting in January 2021 where retail investors coordinated on Reddit and social media ...

SPACs, or blank check companies, raised a record 83 billion in 2020 and 162 billion in 2021. SPACs g...

A massive collapse in cryptocurrency prices in 2022. Bitcoin fell from 69,000 in November 2021 to 16...

A banking crisis that saw the second, third, and fourth largest bank failures in US history. Silicon...

A political debate in the late 19th century United States over whether to back the dollar with both ...

The Free Banking Era from 1837 to 1863 allowed anyone to start a bank and issue currency with minima...

The Mexican peso crisis, also called the Tequila Crisis, began when Mexico devalued the peso on Dece...

The Turkish lira lost 40 percent of its value against the dollar in 2018. The crisis was caused by P...

In September 2019, the overnight repo market in the US suddenly seized up. Repo rates spiked from 2 ...

A crisis in the Chinese real estate sector starting in 2021. Evergrande, Chinas second largest prope...

Central banks worldwide raised interest rates aggressively in 2022 to combat inflation. The US Feder...

James Marshall discovered gold at Sutters Mill on January 24, 1848, triggering the California Gold R...

The 1980s saw a wave of leveraged buyouts, where investors used borrowed money to acquire companies....

In the years before January 1, 2000, companies and governments worldwide spent an estimated 300 to 6...

The London Stock Exchange crashed in September 1929, two months before Wall Street. The crash was tr...

On October 13, 1989, the Dow fell 190 points, 6.9 percent, triggered by the collapse of a leveraged ...

In March 2020, the S&P 500 triggered circuit breakers four times in eight trading sessions, halting ...

Alexander Hamiltons whiskey tax of 1791 was the first tax on a domestic product by the new US govern...

The Stamp Act of 1765 imposed the first direct tax on American colonists. It required printed materi...

The Tea Act of 1773 gave the British East India Company a monopoly on tea sales in the colonies, und...

The Jobs and Growth Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2003 lowered capital gains taxes from 20 to 15 ...

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was the largest tax overhaul in 30 years. It cut the corporate tax...

The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was the largest climate investment in US history, allocating 369...

The CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 allocated 52 billion to subsidize semiconductor manufacturing in t...

The Georgia Gold Rush of 1829 was the first major gold rush in the United States, twenty years befor...

Gold was discovered in New South Wales and Victoria in 1851. The Australian gold rush transformed th...

The discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886 transformed South Africa. The gold was deep under...

The Poseidon bubble was an Australian stock bubble centered on Poseidon NL, a nickel mining company....

The Souk al-Manakh stock market in Kuwait was an unregulated over the counter market for Gulf shares...

In 2005 to 2008, China launched put warrants on stocks that became speculative manias. Retail invest...

The stock market recovery during the Obama presidency from March 2009 to January 2017 was one of the...

During the Trump presidency from January 2017 to January 2021, the S&P 500 rose from 2,277 to 3,851,...

During the Biden presidency starting January 2021, the S&P 500 initially continued rising, reaching ...

Modern economic historians have revised the traditional tulip mania narrative. The most extreme pric...

Charles Dickens witnessed Railway Mania and satirized it in his 1846 novel Dombey and Son. The chara...

The Florida land boom of the 1920s was one of the first modern real estate bubbles. Promoters sold u...

The Nifty Fifty were a group of large cap growth stocks on the NYSE in the 1960s and early 1970s tha...

William Bernsteins 2002 book The Four Pillars of Investing became a foundational text of modern inve...

The London Whale was a trading loss at JPMorgan Chase in 2012. Bruno Iksil, a trader in the London o...

The LIBOR scandal involved major banks manipulating the London Interbank Offered Rate, the benchmark...

Wells Fargo was fined 185 million in September 2016 for creating over 2 million fake accounts withou...

The Knickerbocker Trust Company was the third largest trust company in New York. Its collapse in Oct...

The collapse of Creditanstalt, Austrias largest bank, in May 311 triggered a European banking crisis...

The Bank of United States failed on December 11, 1930, one of the largest bank failures in American ...

ESG investing, considering environmental, social, and governance factors, grew from a niche to over ...

After the SPAC boom of 2020 to 2021, studies showed that most SPAC mergers destroyed value for retai...

Mt. Gox was the largest Bitcoin exchange in the world, handling over 70 percent of all Bitcoin trade...

Terra Luna was a cryptocurrency ecosystem worth 60 billion at its peak in April 2022. The TerraUSD s...

The US housing bubble from 2000 to 2006 saw home prices rise 85 percent nationally. In some markets ...

After the Japanese asset bubble burst in 1990, real estate prices collapsed. Urban land prices fell ...

During Chinas property boom, developers built entire cities that sat empty. Ordos in Inner Mongolia ...

The 2015 Chinese stock crash destroyed 3.4 trillion in wealth in a month. Margin financing, where in...

The dot com crash destroyed 5 trillion in market value from March 2000 to October 2002. The NASDAQ f...

In May 2013, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke suggested the Fed might begin tapering its quanti...

Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker raised the federal funds rate to 20 percent in 1981 to kill in...

The Greenspan Put refers to the perceived tendency of Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan to cut...

In November 2002, Federal Reserve Governor Ben Bernanke gave a speech about preventing deflation. He...

In January 1999, Brazil was forced to devalue the real, triggering a currency crisis. The real lost ...