pplpod

Payday loans are secured by first claim on a borrower's next paycheck, once through a post-dated check and now by electronic withdrawal, at APRs that can legally reach 400 percent in some places. Consumer agencies call it a market failure: borrowers in distress are price inelastic, so lenders charge the legal maximum, while adverse selection and fixed origination costs keep fees high and make roll...

Ferruccio Lamborghini, born in 1916, founded the tractor maker Lamborghini Trattori in 1948 and expanded into boilers and air conditioners. Unhappy with the noise, roughness and weak clutches of his Ferraris, he reportedly took his complaints to Enzo Ferrari, and in May 1963 he founded Automobili Ferruccio Lamborghini in Sant'Agata Bolognese to build a refined grand tourer. He hired Giotto Bizzarr...

In 1976 Sol Price, forced out of FedMart, opened Price Club with his son Robert in former Howard Hughes airplane hangars in San Diego as a members-only warehouse for small businesses. Jim Sinegal, who started as a grocery bagger at FedMart, and attorney Jeffrey Brotman opened the first Costco in Seattle in September 1983, capping markups on business goods at 8 to 9 percent, and Costco became the f...

Developers in cities like Hangzhou offered one-kilogram gold bars, worth about 18 percent of an apartment's price, in a market with an estimated 60 to 80 million empty homes. The roots go back to a 1994 tax reform that centralized revenue and left local governments living off sales of land-use rights; land values tripled between 2005 and 2009. After 2008, localities borrowed through Local Governme...

Brothers Tom and Louis Borders, students at the University of Michigan, opened a small Ann Arbor bookshop in 1971, with 1975 seen as the turning point when they bought the inventory of an 80-year-old shop. They avoided textbooks and hired rare book manager Michael Hildebrand and restorer Harvey James Robin, who set up a bindery upstairs. Robert F. DiRomualdo arrived in 1989 to expand the chain, an...

A flash crash is a rapid, deep fall in prices followed by a nearly equal recovery, and the episode argues the cause is usually not aggressive selling but a sudden withdrawal of liquidity as traders and algorithms pull their orders. On May 6, 2010, the Dow fell over 1,000 points and recovered most of it in about 15 minutes. The U.S. Department of Justice blamed Navinder Singh Sarao, a trader workin...

By the late 1960s a barrel of oil hovered around $1.80, coal's share of American industry had fallen from 51 percent in 1951 to 19 percent by 1973, and U.S. oil production peaked in 1970. Nixon's 1971 price ceiling encouraged consumption, and ending the dollar's convertibility to gold cut the real value of OPEC revenue. Egypt's Anwar Sadat, Nasser's successor, allied with King Faisal of Saudi Arab...

On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling BP's Macondo Prospect 41 miles off Louisiana, in over 5,000 feet of water, with the well reaching another 18,000 feet into the crust. High-pressure methane breached the well, expanded up the riser and exploded on deck, killing 11 workers whose bodies were never recovered and injuring 17. The five-story blowout preventer failed: its hydrauli...

The 1997 Asian financial crisis, nicknamed the Tom Yum Kung crisis, followed a boom in which Southeast Asia drew almost half of the capital flowing to developing countries. Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar, encouraging firms to borrow cheap dollars for real estate and politically connected projects. When Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve raised rates, the...

Tower Records began in 1941 when teenager Russell Solomon sold used records in a corner of his father's Sacramento pharmacy, Tower Drugs, which shared a building with the Tower Theater. He opened his first standalone store on Watt Avenue in 1960, took over a former San Francisco grocery store in 1967 and opened the Sunset Strip store in West Hollywood in 1971, with staff acting as the general cont...

Transcontinental and Western Air was formed in 1930 when Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown pressured Transcontinental Air Transport and Western Air Express to merge so larger carriers could handle airmail contracts. Marketed as the Lindbergh Line, it faced a crisis on March 31, 1931, when a TWA Fokker F-10 crashed in a Kansas wheat field, killing all eight aboard, including Notre Dame coach K...

Sebastian S. Kresge sold tinware to all 19 of Frank Winfield Woolworth's stores before putting his $6,700 life savings into a five-and-dime with John G. McCrory in Memphis in 1897. He built the chain from Detroit and incorporated the S.S. Kresge Company with 85 stores in 1912. In 1962 executive Harry Cunningham opened the first Kmart, a small test store in San Fernando, California, followed by an...

In the late 1940s St. Louis had more than 85,000 families crowded into deteriorating tenements, and a 1947 survey found 33,000 homes relying on communal outdoor toilets. With its tax base shrinking and the Federal Housing Act of 1949 offering support, the city pursued slum clearance and hired Minoru Yamasaki, who proposed a mix of mid-rise buildings, walk-ups and a few high-rises with open space....

From 1834 to 1836 the United States boomed on silver from trade with Mexico and China, federal revenue from public land sales and tariffs, and British capital marketed through Anglo-American houses such as Baring Brothers to buy state bonds for canals and roads, all resting on cotton exports that earned British pounds. In 1836 the Bank of England, alarmed by falling specie reserves, raised its rat...

On March 23, 1989, the Exxon Valdez left the Valdez Marine Terminal at 9:12 p.m. carrying 53.1 million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude. Captain Joseph Hazelwood steered out of the outbound lane to avoid ice from the Columbia Glacier, set the autopilot and went to his cabin at about 11:47 p.m., leaving third mate Gregory Cousins, who had already worked six hours and chose not to wake the second mate,...

This episode challenges the popular account that the 2008 crash was caused by government policy pushing banks to lend to low-income buyers. The global pool of fixed income savings doubled from about $35 trillion in 2000 to $70 trillion in 2008, much of it from China, India and Middle Eastern oil states, while the Federal Reserve held the federal funds rate at 1 percent for over a year after the do...

In 1899 engineer James Ward Packard complained about his car to its maker, Alexander Winton, who told him to build his own. James and his brother William built their first car in Warren, Ohio, late that year, and Henry Bourne Joy brought in Detroit investors and moved the company to Detroit by 1902. Albert Kahn designed a 40-acre reinforced concrete plant whose Building 10 brought more than 80 tra...

After the 1973 oil embargo quadrupled prices, oil exporters deposited huge petrodollar profits in Western commercial banks, which recycled them as syndicated loans to Latin American governments on the belief that countries do not go bankrupt, with the IMF's endorsement. Mexico borrowed in US dollars against expected oil revenue, and between 1975 and 1982 the region's commercial bank debt grew more...

Tommy Hilfiger was born in 1951 in Elmira, New York, the second of nine children of a watchmaker and a nurse, and grew up with severe dyslexia. In 1971, after a summer job at a Cape Cod clothing store, he put $150 of savings into People's Place, an Elmira shop selling bell bottoms bought in New York City alongside a hair salon, a record shop and rock concerts in the basement. The store went bankru...

Facing the Volkswagen Beetle and compacts from AMC and Studebaker, Chevrolet general manager Ed Cole launched the Corvair in late 1959 as a 1960 model, and it was named Motor Trend's 1960 Car of the Year. Where the Ford Falcon and Plymouth Valiant simply shrank conventional cars, the Corvair used unibody construction, an air-cooled flat-six with aluminum parts mounted behind the rear wheels, a tra...

By 1986 a workplace PC had better than a 90 percent chance of running Microsoft's operating system, and in 1995 Netscape Navigator threatened to make Windows irrelevant by becoming a platform of its own. The FTC opened an investigation in 1990, deadlocked, and passed it to the Department of Justice, whose 1994 settlement still let Microsoft integrate new features into Windows. Microsoft gave Inter...

Harry and Esther Snyder opened In-N-Out in Baldwin Park, California, in 1948, using a two-way speaker to create what the episode calls California's first true drive-through hamburger stand. They refused to franchise or take outside investors, and when Harry died in 1976 at 63 the chain had just 18 locations. Son Rich Snyder became president at 24, expanded to 93 restaurants as far as San Diego, La...

In 1954 Seagram CEO Samuel Bronfman set out to build a headquarters on Park Avenue and first asked for a 35-story tower topped by an imported English castle. Charles Luckman and William Pereira talked him into a conventional 34-story design with a $15 million budget, announced in July 1954, but his daughter Phyllis Lambert, then in her 20s and living in Paris, wrote a scathing letter and persuaded...

Guccio Gucci was born in Florence in 1881 and by 1897 was carrying luggage at London's Savoy Hotel, studying how wealthy guests dressed and traveled. He later spent four years with the Wagons-Lits sleeper train company and worked for Milan luggage maker Franzi before opening his own shop on Via della Vigna Nuova in Florence in 1921, soon employing 60 artisans. When League of Nations sanctions afte...

Charles Thomas Munger was born in Omaha on January 1, 1924, and as a teenager worked at Buffett & Son, the grocery owned by Warren Buffett's grandfather Ernest. He left the University of Michigan's math program to join the Army Air Corps, which sent him to Caltech to study meteorology, and with help from former dean Roscoe Pound he entered Harvard Law School without an undergraduate degree, gr...