USA

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 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 ...

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

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

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

The founding document of the New York Stock Exchange. On May 17, 1792, 24 stockbrokers signed an agr...

Created by Charles Dow, co-founder of Dow Jones and Company, on May 26, 1896. The original index inc...

The Standard and Poors 500 Index was introduced in 1957, tracking 500 large US companies. It became ...

The worlds first electronic stock exchange, founded on February 8, 1971. NASDAQ originally stood for...

Apple Computer went public on December 12, 1980 at 22 dollars per share. The IPO created more instan...

Amazon went public on May 15, 1997 at 18 dollars per share. The stock rose to 30 dollars on its firs...

Google went public on August 19, 2004 using a unique Dutch auction method at 85 dollars per share. T...

Facebook went public on May 18, 2012 at 38 dollars per share. It was the largest technology IPO in h...

Tesla announced a 5 for 1 stock split on August 11, 2020. Before the split, Tesla traded above 2,000...

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

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...

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

On April 20, 2020, West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures traded at minus 37.63 dollars per barre...

John Bogle founded Vanguard in 1975, creating the first index mutual fund available to individual in...

Alfred Winslow Jones created the first hedge fund in 1949. Jones used a strategy of buying undervalu...

The first Exchange Traded Fund, SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), launched on January 22, 1993. Created by Sta...

Robinhood launched in 2013, offering commission free stock trading through a mobile app. Founded by ...

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...

Warren Buffett took control of Berkshire Hathaway, a struggling textile manufacturer, in 1965. He tr...

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 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...

Paper currency issued by the US government during the Civil War, so called because of the green ink ...

The Gold Standard Act formally placed the United States on the gold standard, fixing the dollar at 2...

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

The First Bank of the United States was chartered in 1791 for 20 years. Proposed by Alexander Hamilt...

The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 to stabilize the economy after the War of...

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

Microsoft went public on March 13, 1986 at 21 per share. The IPO valued Microsoft at 777 million dol...

Visa went public on March 19, 2008, raising 17.9 billion, the largest US IPO at the time. This occur...

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

Nike went public on December 2, 1980 at 22 per share. The company, originally called Blue Ribbon Spo...

Netflix went public on May 23, 2002 at 15 per share. The company had started as a DVD rental by mail...

Tesla went public on June 29, 2010 at 17 per share. It was the first American car company IPO since ...

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 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 Banking Act of 1933, known as Glass-Steagall, separated commercial banking from investment banki...

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 repealed the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investme...

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 was the most comprehensive fin...

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

The Securities and Exchange Commission was created by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 in respons...

The Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 regulated futures and options trading in the United States. It wa...

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 ...

Walmart went public on October 1, 1970 at 16.50 per share. Founded by Sam Walton in 1962, Walmart ha...

Coca-Cola went public in 1919 at 40 per share. The stock dropped to 19 within a year due to sugar pr...

The Walt Disney Company went public on November 12, 1957 at 13.88 per share. The IPO was motivated b...

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 first index fund available to individual investors was launched by Vanguard on August 31, 1976. ...

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

The quantitative investing revolution transformed finance starting in the 2000s. Mathematical models...

In October 2019, major US brokerages including Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E Trade, and Fidelity ...

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

On January 10, 2024, the SEC approved the first US spot Bitcoin ETFs. The approval came after a deca...

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

The Efficient Market Hypothesis, developed by Eugene Fama in 1970, argues that stock prices fully re...

Harry Markowitz published Portfolio Selection in 1952, introducing the idea that investors should co...

The Black-Scholes options pricing model, published in 1973 by Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and Robe...

The New York Stock Exchange, long a bastion of floor traders and specialists, embraced electronic tr...

Direct listings allow companies to go public without using investment banks as underwriters. Existin...

The Pecora Commission, led by Ferdinand Pecora, investigated Wall Street practices after the 1929 cr...

Benjamin Graham published Security Analysis in 1934, laying the foundation for value investing. Grah...

Jim Simons, a mathematician and former NSA codebreaker, founded Renaissance Technologies in 1982. Th...

Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 in his New York apartment. Bridgewater became the l...

Warren Buffett took control of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and transformed it into the greatest inves...

Charlie Munger was Warren Buffetts partner at Berkshire Hathaway for 45 years. Munger shifted Buffet...

Peter Lynch managed the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990, averaging 29.2 percent annually, t...

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...

Tombstone advertisements are the simple, formal notices that investment banks place in newspapers to...

The Bloomberg Terminal was launched in 1982 by Michael Bloomberg after he was laid off from Salomon ...

The invention of the telegraph in 1844 revolutionized stock trading. Before the telegraph, price inf...

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created the central bank of the United States after a century withou...

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...

On August 15, 1971, President Nixon ended the convertibility of the US dollar into gold, effectively...

Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, warned in 1998 that unregulated o...

Michael Lewis published Flash Boys in 2014, exposing how high frequency traders used fiber optic cab...

The 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street depicted the excesses of Jordan Belfort, a penny stock broker ...

The 1987 film Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone, defined the image of 1980s finance. Michael Dou...