Bear Markets & Bad Decisions

John D. Rockefeller didn’t build Standard Oil by raising prices. He built it by lowering them — until no one else could survive. In this episode of  Bear Markets & Bad Decisions , we tell the story of how Standard Oil became the most powerful monopoly in American history, why consumers loved it while it quietly erased competition, and how the government eventually stepped in to break it apart....

In 1872, two Kentucky cousins convinced some of the richest, smartest men in America that they’d discovered a massive diamond field in the American West. Bankers. Generals. Tiffany & Co. Even representatives tied to the Rothschilds. They all bought in — literally rolling around in the dirt, stuffing their pockets with gems, convinced they were witnessing the next great American fortune. They w...

The Summer of Love is remembered as a moment of peace, music, and radical idealism — but beneath the tie-dye and guitar solos, something else was happening. In this episode of  Bear Markets & Bad Decisions , we revisit San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury in 1967 to explore what happens when belief goes viral faster than infrastructure can keep up. As thousands of young people arrived looking for co...

Bread riots weren’t explosions of chaos — they were warnings. In this episode of  Bear Markets & Bad Decisions , we go back to the bread riots of 18th- and 19th-century Europe to understand what really happens when food becomes unaffordable. Not all at once, but slowly. Quietly. One price increase at a time. We explore how rising bread prices strained families, how markets drifted away from wa...

America didn’t ban alcohol because it hated fun — it banned alcohol because it thought morality could fix economics. In this episode of  Bear Markets & Bad Decisions , we dive into Prohibition and the strange alliance that kept it alive: moral crusaders who wanted to save society, and profiteers who wanted the law to stay broken. Together, they created black markets, organized crime, political...

What if  A Christmas Carol  wasn’t a holiday comfort story, but a warning about capitalism? In this episode of  Bear Markets & Bad Decisions , we revisit Charles Dickens’s  A Christmas Carol  not as seasonal nostalgia, but as one of the earliest viral critiques of economic inequality. Written in the shadow of the Industrial Revolution, Dickens’s ghost story exposed a system where record profit...

Tulip Mania was the first recorded speculative bubble in economic history. In this episode of Bear Markets & Bad Decisions, we break down how a flower became a financial asset — and why humans keep falling for the same mistakes. In the 1630s, tulip prices in the Netherlands reached absurd levels before collapsing almost overnight. This episode explores the incentives, psychology, and economic...