Apr 23, 20262 min read
historymarkets
Three things I can't shut up about
A short note on why this site exists. History, making money, and timelines. That's most of it.
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Short pieces on the people, accidents, and decisions behind what you see in the timelines. The 1637 tulip market was smaller than its legend. Isaac Newton kept losing money after he got out early. J.P. Morgan ran America’s 1907 bailout from his library. A Franciscan friar in 1494 wrote the book every accountant still uses. A new one goes up every day.
A short note on why this site exists. History, making money, and timelines. That's most of it.
The 1637 Dutch tulip crash is the template every bubble gets compared to. The truth is smaller, stranger, and mostly limited to rich people.
Isaac Newton, Master of the Royal Mint, sold South Sea Company stock early, watched his friends get rich, bought back in at the top, and lost roughly twenty thousand pounds.
For four days in 1907, a single banker privately saved the US financial system from his home office on 36th Street. Congress was so alarmed it created the Federal Reserve six years later.
The Fed's twelve regional banks, its weird public-private structure, and its resistance to a single board exist because the 1913 Act could not have passed any other way.
Luca Pacioli did not invent double-entry bookkeeping. He wrote the first printed book that explained it clearly. Every annual report in the world still runs on his system.