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From Medici to algorithms — the hands that shape markets.
Speed is half the story. The other half is who gets to speak, and whose words move the price. Across seven hundred years, the set of people with that power has expanded from a single Florentine family to roughly every account on the internet — and now, to the models that read them.
Information was property of whoever owned the fastest couriers. The Medici bank, founded 1397, was the Bloomberg terminal of its era — papal accounts, royal debts, grain prices across the Mediterranean, all passing through one family's ledgers in Florence.
States outsourced finance to joint-stock monopolies. The Bank of England (1694) and the East India Company became quasi-sovereigns — they issued currency, ran armies, and shaped what 'news from abroad' meant in coffeehouses from London to Amsterdam.
The Gilded Age compressed power into individuals. Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller, Morgan — they controlled rail, oil, steel, and the wire services that reported on themselves. The word of one man moved continents.
FDR's reforms imposed disclosure on markets and licensing on broadcast. The SEC required public companies to tell the truth. The Fed published minutes — but with a five-year delay. Secrecy became official policy.
Financial media became a consumer product. CNBC, Bloomberg Television, and a thousand analysts at brokerage desks issued ratings, price targets, and prophetic-sounding commentary — some of it honest, much of it conflicted.
Anyone with a phone is a potential market-moving source. Reddit can force a hedge fund into bankruptcy. A single tweet can swing two trillion in market cap. Now the accounts and the readers are both partly AI.
Each bar is drawn on a log scale — the relative intensity of that era against the others. On a linear scale, the earliest eras would disappear into a single pixel next to the most recent ones.