pplpod

Taipei 101 rose in a city on the Pacific Ring of Fire, about 200 meters from a major fault line and in the path of typhoons, and held the title of world's tallest building from its 2004 completion until the Burj Khalifa passed it in 2009. Its foundation uses 380 piles driven 80 meters into soft soil, some sunk 30 meters into bedrock, each about 1.5 meters wide and able to carry over 1,000 metric t...

By the late 1970s, cheap and accurate quartz watches from Seiko and Citizen, whose crystals vibrate 32,768 times a second, were crushing Switzerland's mechanical watchmakers. In the early 1980s Ernst Thomke, CEO of ETA, set engineers Elmar Mock and Jacques Müller to build a plastic watch, and marketing consultant Franz Sprecher pushed it toward fashion. The name meant "second watch," not Swiss wat...

Subway began in 1965 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, when 17-year-old Fred DeLuca borrowed $1,000 from family friend Dr. Peter Buck, a nuclear physicist, to open Pete's Drive-In Super Submarine Sandwiches and pay for medical school. Their holding company, Doctors Associates Inc., nodded to Buck's doctorate and DeLuca's ambitions. Renamed Subway in 1968, the chain turned to franchising in 1974 and grew...

The 2007 to 2010 subprime mortgage crisis grew from a housing boom built on cheap credit: the Federal Reserve cut rates to 1 percent by 2004 while foreign capital from Asia and oil exporters hunted for yield. Lenders wrote 2/28 adjustable rate mortgages with two-year teaser rates, and under the originate to distribute model brokers collected fees and sold loans to Wall Street within days. Warren B...

Stockton, California, sits where the San Joaquin Valley meets the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, land once home to the Yachicumne, who built villages on raised mounds above seasonal floods. In the 1840s German immigrant Charles Maria Weber, barred as a foreigner from a Mexican land grant, partnered with William Gulnac, who secured the eleven square league Rancho Campo de los Franceses and pas...

In 1960 Tom Monaghan and his brother Jim bought DomiNick's, a pizza shop near Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, with a $500 down payment and $900 borrowed. After eight months Jim, a full-time postman, traded his half for the Volkswagen Beetle they used for deliveries. Tom bought two more stores by 1965, but original owner Dominick DiVarti blocked use of the name, and employee Jim Kennedy s...

A eurodollar is a U.S. dollar deposit held at a bank outside U.S. jurisdiction, free of Federal Reserve reserve requirements and deposit insurance fees, and paying more because it carries more risk. The market grew from Cold War fear of asset freezes. In 1949 Communist China moved dollars to a Soviet-owned Paris bank, the Banque Commerciale pour l'Europe du Nord, whose telex address, Eurobank, gav...

Soichiro Honda worked as a mechanic at the Art Shokai garage before founding Tokai Seiki in 1937 to make piston rings. Toyota rejected his rings for poor quality, so he enrolled in engineering school without graduating and toured factories to study Toyota's quality control, including the five whys. By 1941 he had automated production so unskilled workers could meet Toyota's standards. During World...

Silicon Valley Bank, founded in 1983, served venture capitalists, startups and California wineries. During the pandemic its deposits doubled from $62 billion in March 2020 to $124 billion a year later, and it put over $91 billion into long-term bonds classified as held to maturity, without substantial hedges. When the Federal Reserve raised rates in 2022, those bonds lost tens of billions in marke...

Short selling flips the usual trade: borrow shares, sell them, then buy them back later at a lower price to return to the lender. Lenders are mostly custody banks, pension funds and asset managers, who earn fees and hold cash collateral of about 102 percent of the shares' value. Investors with margin accounts usually sign hypothecation agreements that let brokers lend their shares; while a share i...

Jefferson County, Alabama, was created in December 1819 at the southern edge of the Appalachians, on rare side by side deposits of iron ore, coal and limestone. Birmingham was founded there in 1871 and named for England's industrial city, and after 1890 Black and white rural migrants and European immigrants poured into its mills and mines. A rural-dominated legislature refused to reapportion seats...

Carried interest began with 16th century European ship captains who took a 20 percent cut of the profit on the goods they carried across the ocean. Today it is the share of profits paid to the general partners of private equity, hedge and venture capital funds. Most funds also charge a yearly management fee of 1 to 2 percent of assets, taxed as ordinary income, while carry flows through a distribu...

In 1945 former JCPenney employee Sam Walton bought a Ben Franklin variety store franchise from the Butler Brothers at a high price with steep rent. He cut out regional middlemen, bought direct from manufacturers and passed the savings to customers, and sales grew from $105,000 in the first year to $250,000 by year five. Then the landlord refused to renew the lease and kept the store, forcing Walto...

In the summer of 1998, Russia's ruble lost two thirds of its value in less than a month. The groundwork was years of deficits: the first Chechen War cost close to $30 million a day in early 1995 and an estimated $5.5 billion by 1996, pushing the budget deficit to nearly 10 percent of GDP. The central bank held the ruble in a band of 5.3 to 7.1 per dollar, spending reserves to defend it. Then the 1...

Private equity funds buy private companies or take public ones private, restructure them and sell within about four to seven years. General partners raise money from limited partners such as pension funds, endowments and insurers, then pull four levers: revenue growth, margin expansion, debt paydown and a higher valuation multiple. A leveraged buyout funds most of a purchase with debt placed on th...

A loan shark works outside the law; a predatory lender works through it. A 2006 FDIC audit report defined predatory lending as imposing unfair, deceptive or fraudulent terms during loan origination, usually on loans secured by a house or car. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency catalogued the tactics: loan flipping through repeated refinancing, packing loans with fees and single premium...

Pizza Hut began in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, when Wichita State students Dan and Frank Carney borrowed $600 from their mother to open a pizzeria. The sign they inherited had room for only eight letters, so with five taken by PIZZA, the second word had to fit in three. They began franchising within a year, recruiting fellow students, among them future NFL coach Bill Parcells, and passed 100 location...

Petrodollar recycling is the process by which oil exporters such as OPEC members, Russia and Norway earn more U.S. dollars than their own economies can absorb and send the surplus back into the world. After the 1973 oil crisis, exporters built a collective surplus of roughly $450 billion between 1974 and 1981. The IMF encouraged them to recycle it into U.S. Treasuries and Western banks, which fuel...

Peter Lynch was born in 1944 in Newton, Massachusetts, outside Boston. His father died of brain cancer when he was 10, and as a teenager he caddied at the Brae Burn Country Club, where one regular was D. George Sullivan, president of Fidelity Investments. As a Boston College sophomore studying history and philosophy, he bought Flying Tiger Airlines at $7 a share and watched it reach $80, paying fo...

In 2017 the Paradise Papers leaked 13.4 million confidential documents, 1.4 terabytes of data, covering more than 120,000 people and companies. Most came from Appleby, an offshore law firm with roots in Bermuda, along with corporate service providers and business registries in 19 tax jurisdictions. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung obtained the files and shared them with the International C...

Pan American Airways began in 1927 as a geopolitical block. U.S. Army Air Corps officers including Henry Arnold and Carl Spaatz feared a German-backed Colombian airline seeking landing rights in the Panama Canal Zone and set up a shell company to win the Key West to Havana airmail contract. Juan Trippe, backed by Vanderbilt and Harriman money, already held landing rights in Havana, and days before...

Palm was founded in 1992 in Sunnyvale, California, by Jeff Hawkins, joined by Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan. Its first job, software for the Zoomer handheld, flopped, so Palm survived by selling sync software for Hewlett-Packard devices and its Graffiti handwriting recognition to Apple for the Newton. After U.S. Robotics bought it in 1995 and 3Com acquired U.S. Robotics in 1997, Palm released the...

Louis Brandt opened a workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1848, assembling key-wound pocket watches. In 1892 he produced the first minute repeating wristwatch with a movement from Audemars Piguet, and in 1894 his sons Louis-Paul and César introduced the Omega caliber, built on interchangeable parts. It sold so well that in 1903 the firm renamed itself Omega, the same year both brothers...

On April 29, 2004, a dark cherry metallic Alero rolled off the line in Lansing, Michigan, as workers signed the underside of its hood, ending Oldsmobile after 107 years. Ransom E. Olds founded the company in Lansing in 1897, and when its Detroit factory burned in March 1901, two workers wheeled out the only surviving prototype, the Curved Dash. With no way to make parts, Oldsmobile outsourced engi...

Myspace was launched in August 2003 by marketers at eUniverse, including Brad Greenspan, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, who cloned the best of Friendster and built the first version in ten days on ColdFusion. That fast, flexible code let users inject their own HTML into profiles, and eUniverse's existing list of about 20 million users and subscribers gave the site an instant audience. Greenspan o...