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In November 2008, California voters approved a ballot measure to build a bullet train from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It was supposed to be fast enough to make the journey in under three hours. And passengers could hop on by 2020, for a total cost of $33 billion. Eighteen
Several days ago, just as America’s national debt topped $40 trillion for the first time, China’s official propaganda outlets took the opportunity to mock the United States over this ominous milestone. Xinhua is the Chinese government’s official news agency, and they published a scathing commentary comparing the US national debt
King Hammurabi of Babylon had a simple rule for home builders: if the house you built collapsed and killed its owner, you were put to death. That was law #229, carved in stone almost 4,000 years ago. And some version of this rule has existed for most of human history.
On June 7, 1939, US President Franklin Roosevelt signed a new law authorizing $100 million (a lot of money back then) to buy rubber, tin, tungsten, etc., and put it all in storage. The United States was still at peace at the time. World War II had not yet broken
In 2012, a 76-year-old Vietnam veteran named Jerry Meekins bought a $197 Spirit Airlines ticket to Atlantic City to visit his daughter. Then his doctor told him two things: he had terminal cancer, and he could not fly. Meekins asked for his money back. Spirit said no. He offered a
In June of 1944, American soldiers were storming the beaches of Normandy, leading the fight to defeat the Nazis. Back home, Americans gave everything they had. Some 85 million bought war bonds. The top income tax rate hit 94%, the highest in US history. Even ordinary people paid more and
If you were to head to Bloomberg, CNBC, or Yahoo Finance this morning and see virtually all green across the board in US markets, you wouldn’t think it’s a sad day for America. And yet, despite stocks being up and investors positively effervescent, it is indeed a sad day, because
Four years ago this month, Washington passed a law and named it, with a straight face, the Inflation Reduction Act. Bizarrely, their plan to ‘reduce inflation’, which had been caused by excessive government spending, was for the government to spend even more money. It’s genius! Among its various provisions, part
When Walmart founder Sam Walton passed away in 1992, his family fortune made him the wealthiest person on the planet… by far. His Walton Family Enterprises was worth $23.8 billion— nearly four times as much as Bill Gates at the time. And if he were still alive today, Walton would
At 4:15 in the morning on November 4, 1956, Soviet artillery opened fire on the city of Budapest. And the subsequent firestorm was nothing short of devastating. Two weeks earlier, students and factory workers had risen up against the Soviet-installed puppet government in Hungary. They pulled down Stalin’s statue, rampaged
Arguably the most famous man on the planet throughout the 1700s was the famed writer Francois-Marie Arouet, known to history as Voltaire. He wasn’t just a celebrity writer and philosopher, however; Voltaire was also a wealthy capitalist and nobleman who almost single-handedly turned the impoverished region of Ferney into a
Every country on earth keeps a rainy-day fund: a pile of emergency savings, managed by its central bank, set aside for wars, crises, and currency runs. These stockpiles of cash around the world are known as a nation’s “reserves”, and the people who manage those funds are called reserve managers.
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