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You think you know the history of the American Revolution. George Washington crossing the Delaware. Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration. But there’s one founder you’ve likely never heard of, and he was just as important. The war for independence started and ended on a financial note, and the man at the center of the money problem was someone most of us have never heard of: Robert Morris, the...

In the 1840s, Britain deployed more capital in railways than any nation had ever invested in anything outside of war. At the peak, capital invested was more than 7% of GDP… in a single year. That’s three times what the US is spending on AI today. And almost all of it came, not from governments or great banks, but from the savings of private individuals. At the center of it stood another George. Th...

Every so often a technology arrives that changes everything. For over 5,000 years, the fastest a human being or a ton of freight could move overland was the speed of a horse. Then, in the span of a single generation, that constraint was gone. We are living through one of these revolutions right now, sparked by artificial intelligence. When you look at other revolutions in history, nothing quite co...

The final chapter in our 80s on Wall Street series bridges the story from the rise of high yield bonds and leveraged buyouts to the birth of modern distressed debt investing. At the center of it are two legendary investors: Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. Howard Marks grew up in Queens, studied finance at Wharton, and trained under the Chicago School’s efficient market hypothesis before watching the...

Oil is one of the most important commodities in the world. Despite that, it’s probably one of the most misunderstood and underappreciated markets even by sophisticated market participants. Especially when you consider that oil is about a third of global energy, more than 90% of transportation energy, and the price of oil directly impacts everything else in the economy. But that’s not the whole sto...

In the first three parts of this series, we covered Michael Milken building the high-yield bond market, Ross Johnson triggering the RJR Nabisco bidding war, and KKR winning the biggest LBO in history. But there is a missing piece to the puzzle: where did all the money come from? The answer leads us to Fred Carr, a largely forgotten figure who may be the most important person in 1980s finance that...

We pick up where we left off in Part 2. Ross Johnson, CEO of RJR Nabisco, presents a management buyout bid for $75-per-share—a number he’s certain will get the deal done without competition. Instead, as soon as the board issues the customary press release announcing the buyout bid, RJR Nabisco is in play as the most prized buyout target on Wall Street. Ross Johnson alienates not one, but two major...

In 1987, America is riding one of the greatest bull markets in history—until it all comes to an abrupt end on Black Monday, October 19th 1987. Portfolio insurance, a fragile strategy built on unrealistic market assumptions, helps turn a selloff into the single worst day in stock market history. Ross Johnson, the CEO of RJR Nabisco, watches as his stock price gets cut in half in a day… even though...

The 1980s were an iconic decade on Wall Street. Michael Milken and his team at Drexel were key players in sparking the wave of buyouts that were emblematic of the era. Before all that, in the early 1970s, a young Michael Milken joined Drexel to focus on low-grade bonds. He had discovered the research of W. Braddock Hickman, which concluded low-grade bonds could generate attractive investment retur...

In Part 1, George Mitchell unlocked shale gas. In Part 2, Aubrey McClendon fueled the boom with a capital and land machine at Chesapeake. In Part 3, we tell the story of one of the operators who makes shale production stick. EOG Resources led by CEO Mark Papa cultivates a unique (and uniquely secretive) culture of rigorous capital allocation and constant technical experimentation. We follow Papa a...

At the end of Part 1, Devon had just bought Mitchell Energy for $3.5B and locked in the technological innovation behind the shale revolution. But the real boom in drilling, debt, and production doesn’t kick off until a worldclass landman and dealmaker from Oklahoma City—Aubrey McClendon—decides to bet his career and wealth on natural gas being the defining fuel of the 21st century. In this episode...

George Mitchell and his team—people like Nick Steinsberger—through relentless experimentation and financial pressure targeted natural gas in the Barnett Shale and unlocked generations of US energy supply. The question was less, “is the gas there?” and more “can it be produced economically?” By answering that question they changed the US natural gas market, global geopolitics, and the daily life of...

Imagine starting a company to change the world of finance right before an epic stock market crash. Elon Musk famously said that PayPal wasn’t a hard company to create. It was a hard company to keep alive. In 1999, three future titans of technology—Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk—charge straight into the blaze to bring payments and finance into the internet age. This is the story of how a h...

Technology waves are easy to see in hindsight, but often hard to see before they arrive. It’s even harder to build enough conviction to take a risk, ride the wave, and build something great. Jeff Bezos did just that. And while the Amazon story has been told many times, it’s fascinating to think about what he saw that gave him the confidence to leave his comfortable Wall Street job to start Amazon....

In the late 1990s, the internet grew exponentially to become an enormous engine for technological progress and economic disruption. The existing telecommunications infrastructure was designed to carry voice and television signals—not data packets. The system needed billions of dollars in fiber and copper to support the tidal wave. Telecom entrepreneurs, incumbent executives and capital markets wer...

Description Gold-rush energy meets browser wars. In mid-1994 Silicon Graphics legend Jim Clark sits down with a 22-year-old programmer Marc Andreessen in the heart of Silicon Valley. Clark, a rebellious hardware icon trying to reinvent himself, and Andreessen, fresh off building the first web browser, bet that the browser will be the operating system to the open web. Their new company races from z...

A run on the dollar, stagflation, and an election on the line—Part 3 wraps up the series with President Nixon’s shocking announcement to shut the gold window… a move that changed the monetary system forever and signaled the beginning of the end for the perception of gold as money. We meet John Connally, the swaggering Democratic governor of Texas who rode in the car with JFK when he was shot, and...

On the journey towards President Nixon’s fateful decision on August 15th, 1971 to suspend dollar-gold convertibility—a decision that would forever change the global economy—we meet William McChesney Martin Jr, the longest-serving Fed chairman in history and arguably the most consequential economic US policy maker since Alexander Hamilton. After negotiating Fed independence as an Assistant Treasury...

Gold, power, war, and spies—this series has it all. On August 15th 1971, President Nixon announced that he was suspending the dollar’s convertibility into gold. This announcement upended the Bretton Woods monetary system and set the world on a course towards floating exchange rates with the US dollar as a fiat reserve currency for world trade—a system that is under significant pressure today. In t...

In Part 2: The Banking Crisis, we pick up where Part 1: The Housing Bubble leaves off—with financial institutions all over the world holding mortgage-backed securities as housing prices start to collapse at the end of 2006. In this episode, we tell the story of a financial system that became addicted to mortgage products and complacent about their risk. We cover the basics of banking—how short-ter...

In this episode, we tell the story of the modern mortgage market, how Wall Street financialized it, and how easy credit inflated one of the biggest bubbles in American history. A bubble that, when it finally popped, nearly brought down the entire global financial system. The housing bubble left scars, changed institutions, and shaped the economy we live in today. It’s impossible to understand the...

Quick heads-up : this was our very first episode. We’ve gotten much better since publishing this. If you’re new or looking for the best way to learn about the Dot-Com market cycle, start with The Dot Com Boom: Netscape Lights the Fuse (Part 1) . If you’re just exploring our origin story, by all means listen here. — In the 1990s, the personal computer and the internet combined to transform the glob...