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Morgan consolidates U.S. Steel
J. Pierpont Morgan's creation of U.S. Steel takes robber barony to a whole new level. Morgan adds several small steel companies to his own steel holdings and persuades Andrew Carnegie to sell his massive company to the new trust, which at a capitalization of $1.4 billion is the world's first billion-dollar company. U.S. Steel controls 65% of U.S. steel output and further focuses the kind of negative attention on giant trusts that leads to the trustbusting of the early 20th century. -
U.S. immigration peaks
Their influence peaks before World War I, when a flood of immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe powers the growth of New York and the other new metropolises of the Northeast and Midwest, helping turn the U.S. into the world's foremost industrial nation. Immigration tops out in 1907, when more than 1 million European immigrants pass through New York's Ellis Island. -
Hallmark gets its start
Joyce C. Hall, a teenager from Norfolk, Nebraska, arrives in Kansas City, Mo., in 1910 and starts building a picture-postcard business into a giant of doggerel and cheer that would reshape American holiday celebrations. Hallmark is instrumental in the commercialization of holidays, which has driven a huge amount of the growth in U.S. retailing. -
The Supreme Court orders the breakup of Standard Oil
In an 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court affirms the government's right to limit corporate power, ordering everyone's favorite monopoly split into 34 different companies. Roc-a-fella, who would grow even richer after the breakup when shares in Standard Oil's newly traded subsidiaries doubled and tripled in their first days of trading. -
Thomas Watson becomes president of IBM's predecessor
Thomas J. Watson is fired from National Cash Register in 1913, after having been framed for a scheme to create a dummy competitor to the monopolistic NCR. He joins Computing-Tabulating-Recording and quickly rises to lead the company, which is renamed International Business Machines in 1923. -
The Panama Canal opens
In the late 19th century, the French try to build a canal across the Panama isthmus connecting the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. They fail, so the U.S. sends a gunboat down Panama way. Now ships traveling from New York to San Francisco can save a modest 7,872 miles by not detouring around South America. U.S. -
Alfred Sloan becomes president of General Motors
At the beginning of the 1920s, General Motors is nearly bankrupt and Ford has nearly 60% market share. By targeting sales, the company avoids internal competition, a strategy that enables GM to bypass Ford as the No. 1 car maker. Sloan's revitalized GM establishes decentralized management, with division heads given the freedom to come up with their own ideas. Almost 80 years later, no large company would go untouched by Sloan's decentralization concept. -
ADM becomes the world's largest linseed oil maker
The rise of Cargill and ADM mirrors the fall of the family farm and the long, slow death of rural America. In 1900, almost 38% of the country's workers are farmers. There are 5.7 million farms averaging 147 acres. In 1990, only 2.6% of the labor force tills the land. There are only 2.1 million farms, but the average acreage has risen to 461. -
The explosion of RCA's stock epitomizes market mania
When RCA and other stocks plunge below pre-1928 levels, it puts the fear of stocks in Americans. Investors turn to safer investments like bonds and, eventually, federally insured bank accounts and certificates of deposit. -
The first U.S. supermarket, King Kullen, opens
Cullen's King Kullen store in Queens, N.Y., is the first to bring together the high volume and low cost that are the hallmarks of the U.S. supermarket -
FDR signs the act creating the Federal Housing Administration
With innovations like the 30-year self-amortizing mortgage, the Federal Housing Administration puts the power of the federal government behind home financing, helping to make home ownership a reality for tens of millions of Americans and powering the residential real estate industry. -
Charles Merrill re-creates Merrill Lynch
In 1940, Merrill merges Merrill Lynch with E.A. Pierce & Cassatt, the firm to which he'd sold Merrill Lynch's retail brokerage and branches in 1930. He then adopts a focus on the customer that builds the new Merrill into the largest U.S. brokerage and gets thousands, then millions, of Americans a share of the stock market's riches. -
Rosie the Riveter and FEPC: Women and minorities contribute to the war effort
Women take factory jobs previously reserved for men, making Rosie the Riveter into a feminist and patriotic icon. And under pressure from civil rights leader and union president A. Philip Randolph, President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 issues an executive order banning race discrimination by the feds and government contractees and creates the Fair Employment Practices Committee to enforce the rule, helping blacks to get previously unavailable jobs. -
The baby boom begins
Randy GIs return from WWII, and nine months later the navel-gazing generation begins. The boomers would impose their (questionable) taste upon all walks of life, from Schwinn bikes in the '50s, to love beads in the '60s, all the way to Internet stocks and SUVs today. -
The first Japanese car, a Toyota, is sold in the U.S
Japanese cars would gain popularity amid the 1970s concern about energy conservation. Though the U.S. auto industry would first try to combat the flood of Hondas with patriotic bumper stickers. -
Eisenhower signs the act creating NASA
President Dwight Eisenhower inks the National Aeronautics and Space Act, creating the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Over the next 40 years the U.S. space program would put a man on the moon and contribute to advances in computer science, weather research, communications technology and lots of other good stuff. Total cost: a mere $14 billion annually -
Bank of America launches the first credit card
In September 1958, it mails out the first buy-stuff-at-more-than-one-place or get-a-loan-from-it credit card to its customers in Fresno, Calif. Credit limits are $300 to $500. Loans are offered at a rate of 18% a year. -
Maiman unveils the first working laser
Theodore Maiman's creation paves the way for multiple innovations, including high-quality printing, new forms of surgery, fiber-optic communications, bar-code scanners, CDs and laser tag. -
Valium is introduced
The first billion-dollar medicine and one of the first brand-name drugs, Valium launches the era of blockbuster medicines. More prescriptions are written for it than for any other drug between 1969 and 1982. But while the Swiss may have pioneered the blockbuster, the Americans later master it. -
Intelsat 1 goes into service
The first commercial communications satellite, nicknamed Early Bird, introduces live commercial television across oceans. Years later this wonderful technology would mean we could share the O.J. trial with the people in Yemen. -
Michael Milken starts Drexel's junk-bond trading operation
Milken and the firm then known as Drexel Harriman Ripley begin underwriting high-yield "junk" bonds for entrepreneurs previously cut out of the capital markets. Milken's clients include Turner Broadcasting and Mirage Resorts, unleashing Ted Turner and Steve Wynn on an unsuspecting American public. Would-be corporate raiders soon turn to junk as a source of financing. A little insider trading later, the 1980s are in full swing. -
MCI is authorized to compete with AT&T
MCI, founded in 1968, receives FCC approvals in 1969 that let the company build its first microwave route and interconnect with local phone companies. But the upstart scores its big breakthrough in 1971, when MCI (today subsumed into MCI WorldCom) becomes the first company authorized to compete with AT&T in the domestic private line market. -
John Bogle launches the First Index Investment Trust
The fund that becomes the Vanguard Index 500 starts with just $11 million in assets under management and can't even buy all of the S&P 500 stocks until 1977. But it starts a revolution in investing, luring billions from investors concerned about the risks and costs of actively managed funds. -
The government bails out Chrysler
President Jimmy Carter signs the Chrysler Loan Guarantee Act, offering the troubled automaker $1.5 billion in federal support. The company would pay back the loans in 1983, seven years ahead of schedule. But the bailout wouldn't create the great moral hazard critics feared, since most big companies would either straighten up and fly right or, like Pan Am, be allowed to go bankrupt. -
The CCITT Group 3 recommendation for facsimile machines is adopted.
Offices know that if they buy a Brand X fax machine, they can send documents in a matter of minutes to a Brand Y machine across the country. With the innovation of email, faxing would seem to take forever. And a T1 line becomes a must. -
The Black Monday crash
The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops 508 points, a stunning 22.6%, on "Black Monday," raising fears that the U.S. economy is headed for a severe recession, or even a depression. But the Federal Reserve acts quickly to cut interest rates and pump cash into the banking system, helping end the threat. -
Period: to
January 1, 1990 through December 31, 2010
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AT&T Security Glitch
Programming error in software for the AT&T electronic switching systems causes a nine-hour outage, blocking an estimated 5 million calls. -
Netscape goes public
The World Wide Web takes a great leap forward with Netscape's IPO, just 16 months after the company's founding. Morgan Stanley prices the young browser maker's stock at $28 a share, having boosted its expected range to $21 to $24 from $12 to $14. Netscape soars to 75 intraday and closes at 58 1/4. -
AOL goes to flat-rate pricing
America Online's move away from rates based on the amount of time spent online to pay-one-price charging is a crucial step toward the now-dominant view of the Internet as an advertising-driven mass medium. -
Twin Towers Terrorist Attack
The 9/11 terrorist attacks were the events that helped shape other financial events of the decade. After that terrible day in September 2001, our economic climate was never to be the same again. It was only the third time in history that the New York Stock Exchange was shut down for a period of time. In this case, it was closed from September 10 - 17. Besides the tragic human loss of that day, the economic loss cannot even be estimated -
Stock Market Crash of 2002
After a brief slide post 9/11, the stock market rallied, but began to slide again in March 2002. The market reached lows not seen since 1997 and 1998 by July and September of 2002. The corporate fraud scandals, such as Enron, along with 9/11, were contributors to this loss of investor confidence in the stock market. -
Hurricanes Katrina
On August 25, 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the U.S. as a strong Category 3 or low Category 4 storm. It quickly became the biggest natural disaster in U.S. history, almost destroying New Orleans due to severe flooding -
Benjamin Graham's Security Analysis is published
Graham's bracingly simple philosophy hinges on those three little words, margin of safety. That means you buy stocks trading at a significant discount to their intrinsic value. To be extra safe, you buy stocks worth at least 50% more than they cost. You skip the high price-to-earnings ratios, the swollen price-to-book ratios. Graham popularizes the concept of valuation, and value, as guiding forces of investing.
