Financial history from primary sources
Long-form writing on the crises, bubbles, and institutions that made modern finance — built from peer-reviewed research, central-bank archives, and contemporaneous reporting. Edited by Sam.
Featured
The Flash Crash: When Algorithms Broke the Market in 36 Minutes (2010)
On May 6, 2010, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged nearly 1,000 points in minutes before recovering almost as quickly.
The 2008 Financial Crisis: When the System Broke
The collapse of the U.S.
The 1929 Crash: Black Tuesday and the Road to the Great Depression
The Wall Street crash of October 1929 marked the end of the Roaring Twenties and the beginning of the worst…
Tulip Mania: The World's First Speculative Bubble (1637)
How a rare flower bulb became the center of history's most famous speculative frenzy in the Dutch Golden Age, with…
Latest→
Overend Gurney and Black Friday 1866: How Bagehot's Rule Was Made
On 10 May 1866 the greatest discount house in the world stopped paying, with £11 million of liabilities and a hole its partners had sold to the public ten months…
Historical records
The Poseidon Bubble: How a Nickel Shell Went from 80 Cents to $280
In September 1969 a near-dormant Adelaide shell announced nickel sulphides at Mount Windarra without publishing a single assay.
Historical records
Ivar Kreuger: The Match King Who Made Auditing Mandatory
Ivar Kreuger lent roughly $387 million to fifteen governments in exchange for national match monopolies, financed it by selling securities to American savers, and forged 500 million lire of Italian…
Historical records
The Big Bang: How London Deregulated Its Stock Exchange in 1986
On 27 October 1986 the London Stock Exchange abolished fixed commissions, the separation of brokers from jobbers, and restrictions on who could own a member firm.
Historical records
The Paperwork Crisis: When Certificates Broke Wall Street
Between 1967 and 1970 Wall Street's back offices collapsed under the weight of paper share certificates. Unsettled trades reached $4.
Historical records
How J.P. Morgan Invented the Credit Default Swap, 1994
A hedge built in 1994 to free capital against an Exxon credit line grew into a market of $62 trillion notional by 2007. The Lehman auction settled for $5.
Historical records
The London Gold Pool: Defending $35 Gold, 1961–1968
From November 1961 eight central banks sold gold in London to hold the price at $35 an ounce.
Historical records
Smoot-Hawley, 1930: The Tariff That Closed World Markets
A promise of farm relief became a revision of more than 20,000 duties, signed on 17 June 1930 over the objection of 1,028 economists.
Historical records
Crises & Crashes→
The 2014 Russian Ruble Crisis: Oil, Sanctions and a Midnight Hike
Between June and December 2014 Brent crude halved, Western sanctions closed off external funding, and the ruble fell from 33…
The 2015 Chinese Stock Market Crash: The Summer Margin Broke Shanghai
Between July 2014 and June 2015 the Shanghai Composite rose from about 2,050 to a peak of 5,166 — a…
WorldCom: Bernie Ebbers and the $11 Billion Fraud, 1999–2002
Between the fourth quarter of 2000 and the first quarter of 2002, WorldCom's finance team reclassified roughly $9 billion of…
Crédit Mobilier: How the Union Pacific Bought Congress, 1864–1873
On 4 September 1872 the New York Sun printed Henry McComb's stolen correspondence and exposed how Oakes Ames had distributed…
The Panama Canal Scandal: France Lost 1.5 Billion Francs, 1881–1893
On 4 February 1889 a Paris court placed the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique into liquidation, ending the most ambitious…
Bubbles & Manias→
The Poseidon Bubble: How a Nickel Shell Went from 80 Cents to $280
In September 1969 a near-dormant Adelaide shell announced nickel sulphides at Mount Windarra without publishing a single assay.
Historical records
The 2017 Bitcoin Bubble: From $1,000 to $19,783 and Back
Bitcoin ran from $998 to $19,783 in eleven months on Japan's 2017 legalisation, a $5.6 billion wave of initial coin offerings, and retail mania.
Historical records
The Japanese Asset Bubble: When Tokyo Was Worth More Than California (1985-1990)
How the Plaza Accord, ultra-low interest rates, and a culture of financial invincibility inflated Japan's stock and real estate markets to absurd heights before a crash that produced the longest…
Historical records
The Dot-Com Bubble: Irrational Exuberance and the Internet Gold Rush (1995-2000)
How the promise of the internet fueled a speculative mania that drove the NASDAQ to 5,048 before a crash that wiped out $5 trillion in market value and reshaped the…
Historical records
The South Sea Bubble: When Britain Gambled on a Trading Company
The rise and collapse of the South Sea Company in 1720 ruined thousands of British investors, famously including Isaac Newton, and exposed the dangers of government-backed financial schemes.
Historical records
The Railway Mania: Britain's Victorian Tech Bubble (1840s)
How a revolutionary new technology sparked a speculative frenzy in 1840s Britain, with eerie parallels to the dot-com bubble 150 years later.
Historical records
Policy & Regulation→
The London Gold Pool: Defending $35 Gold, 1961–1968
From November 1961 eight central banks sold gold in London to hold the price at $35 an ounce.
Historical records
The Cyprus Bail-In: When Eurozone Depositors Paid for the Banks 2013
In March 2013 the Eurogroup forced uninsured depositors at Bank of Cyprus and Laiki Bank to absorb billions in losses to recapitalise their own banks — the first time in…
Historical records
The Marshall Plan: How $13 Billion Rebuilt Postwar Europe 1948–1952
On 5 June 1947, in a twelve-minute Harvard commencement address, Secretary of State George Marshall offered Europe a deal — $13.
Historical records
The Brady Plan: Collateralized Bonds and the End of the Debt Crisis
On 10 March 1989 Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady stood at a Bretton Woods Committee dinner and admitted what every secondary-market trader already knew — that the Latin American bank loans…
Historical records
The Plaza Accord: When Five Nations Moved the Dollar (1985)
How five finance ministers secretly agreed at the Plaza Hotel to depreciate the US dollar, triggering a 50% decline against the yen and setting in motion the chain of events…
Historical records
The Glass-Steagall Act (1933): The Wall Between Banking and Speculation
How the Banking Act of 1933 erected a firewall between commercial and investment banking, reshaping American finance for over six decades before its repeal.
Market Histories
Market Innovation→
How J.P. Morgan Invented the Credit Default Swap, 1994
A hedge built in 1994 to free capital against an Exxon credit line grew into a market of $62 trillion notional by 2007. The Lehman auction settled for $5.
Historical records
Casa di San Giorgio: Genoa's State Within a State, 1407-1805
Founded in 1407 to consolidate Genoa's tangled forced-loan debts, the Casa di San Giorgio became a creditor-controlled bank that collected the Republic's taxes, ran its overseas colonies, and outlasted every…
Historical records
The Riksbank: How a 1668 Bank Failure Built the Oldest Central Bank
Stockholms Banco, Europe's first issuer of printed banknotes, collapsed in 1668 after over-printing kreditivsedlar far beyond its copper reserves.
Historical records
Bank of Amsterdam: The Wisselbank and Modern Money (1609-1820)
Founded on 31 January 1609 by the city of Amsterdam, the Wisselbank imposed order on a chaos of 800 coin types by inventing a stable, abstract unit of account called…
Historical records
Lloyd's of London: How a Coffee House Became the World's Insurance Market (1686-Present)
In 1686, a coffee house on Tower Street served ship captains and merchants who gathered to share news and place bets on voyages.
Historical records
Luca Pacioli and Double-Entry Bookkeeping: The Accounting Revolution That Made Capitalism Possible (1494)
In 1494, a Franciscan friar named Luca Pacioli published a 615-page mathematics encyclopedia that included a 27-page section codifying double-entry bookkeeping.
Historical records
Key Figures→
Ivar Kreuger: The Match King Who Made Auditing Mandatory
Ivar Kreuger lent roughly $387 million to fifteen governments in exchange for national match monopolies, financed it by selling securities to American savers, and forged 500 million lire of Italian…
Historical records
Charles Ponzi and the 1920 Postal Coupon Scheme
In nine months of 1920, Charles Ponzi took roughly $20 million from 30,000 Bostonians by promising 50% returns in 45 days on international postal reply coupons.
Historical records
John Law: The Scottish Gambler Who Invented Paper Money (1671-1729)
Born in Edinburgh in 1671 to a goldsmith-banker, John Law killed a man in a London duel, escaped a death sentence, spent fifteen years at the card tables of Europe,…
Historical records
The Fugger Dynasty: How Jakob Fugger Became the Richest Man in History (1459-1525)
Jakob Fugger of Augsburg built history's greatest fortune by monopolizing European copper and silver mining while financing Habsburg emperors.
Historical records
Jesse Livermore: The Boy Plunger of Wall Street
The extraordinary life of Jesse Livermore -- from teenage bucket shop trader to the man who shorted the 1929 crash, and the personal demons that led to his tragic end.
Market Histories
George Soros: The Man Who Broke the Bank of England (1992)
How George Soros bet $10 billion against the British pound on Black Wednesday, forced the UK out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and earned $1 billion in a single…
Historical records
Market Structure→
The Big Bang: How London Deregulated Its Stock Exchange in 1986
On 27 October 1986 the London Stock Exchange abolished fixed commissions, the separation of brokers from jobbers, and restrictions on who could own a member firm.
Historical records
The Paperwork Crisis: When Certificates Broke Wall Street
Between 1967 and 1970 Wall Street's back offices collapsed under the weight of paper share certificates. Unsettled trades reached $4.
Historical records
Knight Capital Meltdown: 45 Minutes, Bad Code, $440 Million (2012)
On 1 August 2012, a deployment error left dormant 2003 code running on a single Knight Capital server.
Historical records
Herstatt Bank: How Cologne Created Settlement Risk (1974)
On 26 June 1974, West German regulators pulled the licence of a mid-sized Cologne private bank at the close of Frankfurt business.
Historical records
Bretton Woods: The Architecture of the Post-War Monetary Order (1944-1971)
How 730 delegates at a New Hampshire resort designed the global monetary system that underpinned three decades of unprecedented prosperity — and why Richard Nixon dismantled it.
Historical records
Macro Events→
Smoot-Hawley, 1930: The Tariff That Closed World Markets
A promise of farm relief became a revision of more than 20,000 duties, signed on 17 June 1930 over the objection of 1,028 economists.
Historical records
Turkey's Lira Crisis: Erdogan's Unorthodox Policy and 2021 Collapse
Between 2017 and 2024 the Turkish lira lost roughly 89 percent of its value against the US dollar, the product of an explicit presidential theory — high interest rates cause…
Historical records
Hungarian Pengo Hyperinflation: Worst Monetary Collapse, 1945-46
Between August 1945 and July 1946, prices in Hungary doubled every fifteen hours and the National Bank issued a 100 quintillion pengo note — the largest denomination of currency in…
Historical records
The Continental Currency: Not Worth a Continental (1775-1783)
Between June 1775 and November 1779 the Second Continental Congress printed roughly $241 million in paper dollars to pay a war it could not tax for.
Historical records
The Kipper und Wipper: Thirty Years War Coinage Debasement
Between 1619 and 1623, princes across the Holy Roman Empire melted down good silver coins and restruck them with base metals to fund the opening campaigns of the Thirty Years…
Historical records
The Suez Crisis: How America's Financial Weapon Ended the British Empire (1956)
When Britain invaded Egypt to reclaim the Suez Canal in 1956, the United States responded not with troops but with financial warfare — selling sterling, blocking IMF credits, and threatening…
Historical records
Financial history from primary sources. Edited by Sam.