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President Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Trade Commission into law in 1914, after the 1911 Standard Oil case showed courts alone moved too slowly against monopolies. The agency enforces civil antitrust law and consumer protection through five commissioners serving seven-year terms, with no more than three from one party. Section 5 of the FTC Act lets it declare unfair methods of competition and...

On March 23, 2021 the Ever Given, a 224,000-ton ship that can carry about 20,000 containers, was fifth in a northbound convoy through a single-lane stretch of the Suez Canal. It had transited the canal 22 times before. A sandstorm brought winds over 40 knots that pushed against its stacked containers, and the bank effect, a low-pressure zone created as displaced water rushes between hull and bank,...

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 outlawed agreements in restraint of trade, but courts used it against labor unions, treating strikes as illegal combinations. It also invited mergers, because companies that fused into one entity no longer had an agreement to police, and the largest merger wave in U.S. history followed. In 1914 Alabama Democrat Henry De Lamar Clayton Jr. introduced the Clayton Ant...

When the first Project 971 attack submarine was launched in 1985, Western intelligence believed the Soviet Union was a decade away from that level of quiet. NATO called it the Akula, Russian for shark, though the Soviets called the project Shchuka-B and used Akula for the boats NATO named Typhoon. The design wraps a titanium or high-yield steel pressure hull inside a lighter outer hull shaped for...

Brothers John, Paul and William Amos founded the American Family Life Insurance Company of Columbus in Georgia in November 1955 and signed 6,426 policyholders in the first year. In 1958 they pioneered cancer insurance, a supplemental product that pays cash directly to the policyholder rather than to hospitals. In 1964 they began selling through employers with payroll deductions, which made premium...

In May 1978 Bill Rasmussen and his son Scott were fired from the World Hockey Association's New England Whalers. They rented an office in Plainville, Connecticut to plan a sports network, but local zoning banned satellite dishes, so they bought land in Bristol. In February 1979 Getty Oil bought 85% of the company, and Anheuser-Busch committed $1 million in advertising. ESPN launched on September 7...

As a Yale student, Frederick W. Smith wrote a term paper proposing a dedicated air network for overnight delivery, and legend says it earned roughly a C. He founded Federal Express in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1971 and moved operations to Memphis in 1973, choosing it for mild weather and its location near the country's population center, ideal for a hub-and-spoke system where every package flies to...

The company that runs Caesars today began in May 1973, when investors led by Don Carano opened the Eldorado Hotel in Reno. In 1995 the family partnered with Circus Circus on the neighboring Silver Legacy, and in 1996 it reorganized as Eldorado Resorts LLC with a $100 million bond offering. Under CEO Gary Carano, Eldorado completed a reverse merger with the publicly traded racino operator MTR Gamin...

In 1980 lawyers filing merger paperwork with the Interstate Commerce Commission combined a C, an S and an X as a temporary name for the union of the Chessie System and the Family Lines, and it was never changed. The roots run to the Baltimore and Ohio in the 1820s. The Chesapeake and Ohio absorbed the B&O and Western Maryland to form the Chessie System, known for its sleeping cat mascot, while...

Federico Faggin and Ralph Ungermann left Intel in 1974, and Masatoshi Shima joined them the next year. Funded by Exxon's computing division, they named the company Zilog, for Z Integrated Logic, with Z meant as the last word in logic. The Z80, released in 1976, ran Intel 8080 code but added a larger instruction set, a built-in DRAM refresh controller and a single 5-volt supply instead of three. It...

Roughly 84 million single-family homes sit in America, and most owners do not know who holds their debt, because mortgages are pooled into a $12 trillion mortgage-backed securities market. The idea of packaging property debt for distant investors dates to 18th century bonds backed by plantation mortgages that used enslaved people as collateral, then to 1850s farm railroad mortgage bonds that fed t...

Taavet Hinrikus, Skype's first employee, and Kristo Käärmann, a Deloitte management consultant, both moved from Estonia to London around 2006. Hinrikus was paid in euros but lived in pounds, while Käärmann earned pounds and owed a mortgage in euros. Banks were taking at least 5% on their transfers, mostly hidden in exchange rate markups and correspondent bank fees. The two began swapping money wit...

William Zeckendorf was born in 1905 in Paris, Illinois, the son of a hardware store manager, and moved to New York City at age three. He dropped out of New York University, learned real estate at his uncle's firm and joined the brokerage Webb and Knapp, which he bought outright in 1949. In 1946 he used option contracts to lock up 17 acres of slaughterhouses and tenements along Manhattan's East Riv...

Harry, Albert, Sam and Jack Warner started the Warner Features Company in 1910 and incorporated Warner Bros. Pictures on April 4, 1923. The brothers expanded into animation by 1929, television in 1955 and music publishing. In 1956 Jack Warner persuaded his brothers to sell their controlling shares together to a banking syndicate, believing the family was retiring. Jack had secretly partnered with...

William E. Boeing, a lumber industrialist, founded his company in Seattle in 1916, and by 1934 antitrust law split it into pieces that became Boeing, United Technologies and United Airlines. For decades engineers set the company's direction. That changed after Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas in 1997, a deal described as a reverse takeover because McDonnell Douglas executives, including CEO Harry...

Venmo began with two University of Pennsylvania freshman roommates, Andrew Kortina and Iqram Magdon-Ismail. After helping a friend open a yogurt shop and seeing slow point-of-sale systems up close, they hit the breaking point when Magdon-Ismail visited Kortina for a weekend without his wallet. Their first prototype ran entirely on SMS text messages, and the name joined the Latin vendere, to sell,...

In the early 1900s Thomas Edison's Motion Picture Patents Company controlled key film patents, including the Latham loop, charged theater owners fees and sent enforcers to smash unlicensed projectors. Chicago nickelodeon owner Carl Laemmle, a German immigrant and former dry goods salesman, stopped paying and in 1909 founded the Independent Moving Pictures Company. He promoted the anonymous Biograp...

The Iowa-class battleship USS New Jersey (BB-62) was ordered in 1939 and launched on December 7, 1942, at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Franklin D. Roosevelt named her to repay a political debt to New Jersey governor and former Navy secretary Charles Edison, who had pushed to build her there. In World War II she guarded aircraft carriers, throwing up dense antiaircraft fire at the Battle of the Phil...

On August 28, 1907, teenagers James E. Casey and Claude Ryan founded the American Messenger Company in Seattle with a $100 loan, carrying messages on foot, by bicycle and by streetcar. As telephones spread they shifted to retail parcels, bought a Ford Model T in 1913 and merged with Evert McCabe's company to form Merchants Parcel Delivery, which pooled many stores' packages on one vehicle. After e...

TurboTax began in 1984 as a product of Michael A. Chipman's ChipSoft and was sold to Intuit in 1993, where it outpaced H&R Block's software and TaxAct. Its reach showed in 2009, when Treasury nominee Timothy Geithner told the Senate he had used TurboTax on returns that left him owing over $42,000 in self-employment taxes from his International Monetary Fund years, and Intuit answered that the...

Texas Instruments began in 1930 as Geophysical Service Incorporated, which set off dynamite and read seismic reflections to help oil companies find deposits. In World War II it applied the same signal processing to submarine detection gear for the U.S. Navy. It reorganized as Texas Instruments in 1951 after finding General Instruments taken, paid Western Electric $25,000 in 1952 for a transistor p...

In 1986 Taiwan's government recruited industry veteran Morris Chang, then in his mid-50s, to build a domestic chip industry. Chang proposed a pure-play foundry that would manufacture chips for other companies and design none of its own. Texas Instruments and Intel turned him down, but Philips took a 27.6% stake for $58 million, transferred technology and supplied first CEO James E. Dykes, while th...

In June 1959 the Del E. Webb Development Company paid over $20 million for 20,000 acres of the Marinette and Santa Fe ranches from the J.G. Boswell Company, on the site of the former ghost town of Marinette. A nationwide naming contest, with a new house as the prize, replaced the working name Marinette Retirement Community with Sun City. On opening weekend, January 1, 1960, about 100,000 people ca...

Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison founded Stripe in Palo Alto in 2010, when accepting payments online meant weeks of merchant accounts, payment gateways and card security work. Stripe let developers take payments by adding a few lines of code, selling to engineers instead of chief financial officers. In 2011 it raised $2 million from backers including Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz and PayPal...

Stephen M. Ross started in 1972 with a $10,000 loan from his mother, founding Related Housing Companies to build subsidized low and moderate income apartments. Working with federal tax credits, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, state finance agencies and local zoning boards taught him how to combine public policy and private capital. In 1998 Related announced the $1.7 billion Time W...