pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

While fortunes evaporated in October 1929, Jesse Livermore walked away with roughly $100 million. This episode follows the man often credited with inventing day trading, from a poor Massachusetts farm, where he was born in 1877, to a Boston brokerage where he chalked up stock prices for $5 a week. Watching the numbers all day, he began to see patterns, and at 15 he tested them in the bucket shops, betting parlors that paid out on price moves. He won so steadily that the shops banned him, even when he showed up in disguise.

Wall Street was harder. In 1901 a heavily margined short position wiped him out because the ticker tape lagged behind the trading floor. He rebuilt, profited when the 1906 San Francisco earthquake hammered Union Pacific, and made a million dollars in a single day during the Panic of 1907. But the discipline that governed his trading never reached his private life. Bad tips, a cotton market betrayal, three bankruptcies, and two ruinous marriages trace the path from the great short of 1929 to his suicide in a Manhattan hotel in 1940.

• Livermore's first wager, $5 on the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, earned him $3.12, and by 16 he was clearing $200 a week.
• During the Panic of 1907, J.P. Morgan personally asked Livermore to stop short selling because his trades were deepening the collapse Morgan was trying to halt.
• After he quietly cornered cotton, Woodrow Wilson's administration summoned him to the White House, where he explained that he did it to see if he could.
• To hide his bet against the market in 1929, he spread his orders across more than 100 brokers and sat through a paper loss of over $6 million that spring.
• By 1934 he was bankrupt for the third time, with $2.5 million in debts against $84,000 in assets.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Jay Gould arrived at a rural school with 50 cents and a sack of clothes. He died with a $72 million fortune, a private steam yacht, and armed guards patrolling his estate around the clock. This episode follows the dairy farmer's son from Roxbury, New York, who taught himself surveying and mathematics, then learned in the Panic of 1857 that a crash is a clearance sale for anyone willing to be unsentimental. He bought out a ruined partner's tannery properties and picked up control of the Rutland and Washington Railroad for 10 cents on the dollar.

From there the stakes only rose. Gould, Daniel Drew, and James Fisk beat Cornelius Vanderbilt in the Erie War by flooding the market with newly issued shares, sheltered by Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall. In 1869 Gould tried to corner the gold market through President Grant's brother-in-law, Abel Corbin, and the collapse became Black Friday. Yet the same man later mastered the working details of the Union Pacific and by 1882 controlled roughly 15 percent of American railway track.

• A dispute over the Pennsylvania tannery turned physical when David Lee, a relative of Gould's ruined partner, seized the property with armed men.
• As the gold corner failed, Gould quietly sold through other brokers at the peak while his partner Fisk was still on the floor shouting orders to buy.
• In 1873 an impostor calling himself Lord Gordon-Gordon took $1 million in stock from Gould and fled to Canada, where a botched kidnapping attempt nearly sparked a border crisis involving the Minnesota militia.
• Gould commuted down the Hudson to Manhattan aboard his yacht, the Atalanta, to avoid a public that despised him.
• Karl Marx called him an octopus railway king in an 1881 letter, while economist Murray Rothbard argued his new lines undercut railroad cartels and lowered shipping costs.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

At the 1989 peak of Japan's asset price bubble, the grounds of the Tokyo Imperial Palace were estimated to be worth more than all the real estate in California. This episode follows the chain of unintended consequences that led there, beginning with the 1985 Plaza Accord. The deal to weaken the dollar sent the yen from about 238 to 165 per dollar in a year, made Japanese exports painfully expensive, and tipped the country into the endaka recession.

The Bank of Japan answered by cutting its discount rate from 5 percent to 2.5 percent, and cheap money found a perfect outlet in land. Inheritance taxes ran as high as 75 percent, but land was appraised at half its market value, and an old lease law gave owners every reason to leave lots empty. Banks that had lost their blue chip clients lent freely against inflated property, stocks and land fed each other, and the Nikkei climbed from around 13,000 to nearly 39,000 before rate hikes ended the party.

• Japan accepted the painful currency adjustment because the U.S. Congress was threatening punitive tariffs that would have locked its exporters out of the American market.
• Ordinary salarymen could borrow up to 100 million yen against their homes as banks stopped underwriting on income and assumed land would never fall.
• Commercial land in Tokyo jumped 122 percent in a single year, and prime Ginza plots reached 30 million yen per square meter.
• Osaka restaurant owner Nui Onoue used forged deposit certificates to borrow more than two trillion yen, and her collapse dragged down two banks.
• Banks kept insolvent zombie companies alive with sham loan restructurings, trapping capital so thoroughly that Japan's GDP in 2017 was only 2.6 percent higher than in 1997.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In January 1872, tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers wept in the streets for James Fisk Jr., a man who had bribed judges, manipulated a president, and helped crash the gold market. This episode traces how a boy born in Vermont in 1835 ran away to join a circus, learned how to sell a spectacle, and carried that showmanship into peddling dry goods, Civil War army contracts, cotton smuggling, and a ruthless short sale of Confederate bonds in London.

On Wall Street, Fisk joined Daniel Drew and Jay Gould in the Erie War, printing fresh shares to dilute Cornelius Vanderbilt and buying the votes in Albany that made the scheme legal. Then came the attempt to corner gold, which ended on Black Friday, September 24, 1869, when President Grant released Treasury reserves. His private life proved just as reckless: a public affair with Josie Mansfield, an extortion plot by Edward Stiles Stokes, and a fatal ambush on the staircase of the Grand Central Hotel.

• Knowing the siege of Petersburg was ending, Fisk sent an agent on a fast boat to London to short Confederate bonds before the news crossed the Atlantic.
• Fisk and Gould put Boss Tweed on the Erie board, then carried suitcases of cash to Albany to pass a law retroactively legalizing the stock they had already printed.
• He installed Josie Mansfield in an apartment on West 23rd Street and built a covered passage connecting it to the Erie Railroad offices.
• A week after the shooting, the New York Herald published all 39 of the supposedly damning letters. They were ordinary love letters, and Stokes, after three trials, served just four years in Sing Sing.
• In June 1872 a newspaper in Porvoo, Finland printed a baseless rumor that Fisk had left money to Finnish relatives, and families were still chasing the imaginary inheritance decades later.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Jakob Fugger, born in Augsburg in 1459, amassed a fortune equal to about 2 percent of the European economy. This episode traces how he did it. Sent to Venice at 14, he learned double entry bookkeeping and the mechanics of metal trading at the headquarters of the German merchants. Back north, he lent to silver mine owners in exchange for shares rather than interest, which gave him the metal itself. He then made himself banker to the perpetually broke Habsburgs, paying an archduke's creditors and court wages directly.

That position let Fugger steer events from behind a desk. He financed Emperor Maximilian I, became banker to the papacy, and in 1519 arranged the 850,000 guilders in bribes that made the teenage Charles V Holy Roman Emperor. When the imperial diet moved against monopolies, he reminded Charles in writing who had paid for his crown, and the laws were dropped. A loan to Albert of Brandenburg, repaid through the sale of indulgences, helped provoke Martin Luther's 95 Theses.

• Church law banned interest, so Cardinal Melchior von Meckau invested 150,000 guilders with Fugger through a discretionary deposit that paid a supposedly voluntary gift.
• When the cardinal died in 1509 and heirs demanded the money, Maximilian claimed the inheritance and forgave the debt in exchange for funding a war against Venice.
• Fugger funded the recruitment of the Swiss Guard in 1506, leased the papal mint, and lent money to Pope Leo X for St. Peter's Basilica.
• Half the proceeds from Johann Tetzel's indulgence campaign went to Rome and half to Fugger's agents, who collected on the spot to pay down Albert's loan.
• In 1521 he founded the Fuggerei in Augsburg, the world's oldest social housing complex. Rent is still the equivalent of one guilder a year plus three daily prayers for the Fugger family.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In October 1907, Otto Heinze tried to corner the stock of United Copper and failed within hours. Because his family was tied to several banks, the collapse set off runs that reached the Knickerbocker Trust Company, the third largest trust in New York, which lost roughly 8 million dollars in under three hours and suspended operations on October 22. This episode explains why trust companies were so fragile: they took deposits like banks but kept almost no cash in reserve, and the country had no central bank to help.

Into that vacuum stepped J.P. Morgan, semi-retired and in his late sixties. From the library of his Madison Avenue brownstone he reviewed the books of failing firms, chose which to save, and pressed bankers, the Treasury, and John D. Rockefeller for cash. The story builds to the night he locked the trust company presidents in his library and to a dawn visit to Theodore Roosevelt's White House. It ends with the reform that followed: the Federal Reserve Act of December 1913.

• The system was already strained before the panic. Cash left New York each autumn to finance the harvest, and the 1906 San Francisco earthquake had drained liquidity through insurance payouts.
• When the president of the New York Stock Exchange warned he would have to close early, Morgan gave bank presidents minutes to pledge 25 million dollars to keep it open.
• On the night of November 2, Morgan locked the library doors and pocketed the key. At 4:45 in the morning the trust presidents signed a 25 million dollar bailout pool.
• To rescue the brokerage Moore and Schley, U.S. Steel had to buy Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad. Roosevelt, the trust buster, agreed not to prosecute hours before the market opened.
• Questioned later by the Pujo Committee, Morgan insisted that the basis of credit is character, not money or property.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Ivan Boesky told graduating business students at UC Berkeley that the desire for wealth was healthy. Months later he was on the cover of Time under the headline Ivan the Terrible, headed for federal prison. This episode follows the Detroit deli owner's son who earned a law degree without finishing college, married Seema Silverstein, the daughter of a wealthy real estate magnate, and used 700,000 dollars of her family's money to open his own Wall Street firm in 1975.

Boesky became the king of risk arbitrage, betting on the outcome of corporate takeovers, and built a fortune of more than 200 million dollars by 1986. His uncanny timing had a simple explanation: investment bankers were feeding him confidential news of pending deals. When the scheme unraveled he paid a record 100 million dollar fine, was barred from the securities business, and turned informant against figures including Michael Milken. His case ended an era when insider trading laws were rarely enforced.

• Risk arbitrage means buying a takeover target's stock below the offer price and collecting the gap if the deal closes. Boesky removed the risk by learning outcomes in advance.
• Bankers Robert Wilkis and Ira Sokolow passed him nonpublic information on deals involving Nabisco Brands, R.J. Reynolds, and Houston Natural Gas.
• A large share of his wealth, 136 million dollars, came from a lawsuit he and Seema won against her sister and brother-in-law for control of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
• He was sentenced to three and a half years and served 20 months at Lompoc, California. His Berkeley speech became a model for Gordon Gekko's monologue in the 1987 film Wall Street.
• In their 1991 divorce Seema agreed to pay him 23 million dollars plus 180,000 dollars a year. He died in May 2024 at 87.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Ida Tarbell grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s, surrounded by gushing wells, deadly explosions, and the wreckage left by the South Improvement Company, a secret alliance of railroads and oil interests that crushed independent refiners like her father in 1872. This episode follows how that childhood, a biology education at Allegheny College, and archival training in Paris produced a new kind of reporter, one who treated her subjects the way a scientist treats a specimen.

At McClure's Magazine she first applied the method to Napoleon and Abraham Lincoln, tracking down people who had known Lincoln and unearthing more than 300 unknown letters and speeches. Then she turned it on John D. Rockefeller. Her 19 part history of the Standard Oil Company relied on documents rather than outrage, and it helped bring about the Hepburn Act, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Supreme Court breakup of the monopoly. The episode also weighs her puzzling opposition to women's suffrage.

• After the Panic of 1857 wiped out the family's savings, her father walked back to Pennsylvania from Iowa over 18 months, arriving in rags. Young Ida told him to go away.
• At The Chautauquan she went to the U.S. Patent Office to check a claim that only about 300 women held patents, and found close to 2,000.
• Publisher Sam McClure recruited her in Paris, missed his train, and had to borrow 40 dollars she had saved for a vacation.
• A Standard Oil office boy assigned to burn records noticed his Sunday school teacher's name on them. The documents, showing the company still got advance word of rivals' shipments from railroads, reached Tarbell.
• Theodore Roosevelt labeled her and her colleagues muckrakers, a name she despised because she believed facts, not attacks, change minds.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Johann August Sutter was a failed Swiss shopkeeper facing debtor's prison when he abandoned his wife and five children in 1834 and sailed for New York. By the time he reached America he was calling himself Captain John Augustus Sutter and claiming a military past he never had. This episode follows his roundabout journey through Oregon, Hawaii, and Russian Alaska to Mexican California, where he talked Governor Juan Bautista Alvarado into granting him 48,400 acres in the Sacramento Valley for a settlement he named New Helvetia.

The fort he built depended on coerced Native American labor, and the accounts of men who worked beside him describe locked rooms, feeding troughs, and raids on villages. Sutter switched loyalties as California passed from Mexican to American control. Then, in 1848, James W. Marshall found gold at the sawmill Sutter had ordered built at Coloma. The rush that followed brought squatters who slaughtered his cattle, trampled his crops, and took his land.

• Sutter reached California by way of Honolulu and Sitka, Alaska, landing at Yerba Buena in July 1839 with 10 Native Hawaiian laborers.
• His manager Heinrich Lienhard wrote that workers were locked in rooms at night without beds, and explorer James Clyman described hundreds fed from troughs made of hollowed tree trunks.
• Sutter and Marshall confirmed the gold with an encyclopedia and simple tests and tried to keep it secret, until merchant Samuel Brannan paraded gold through San Francisco.
• His son John Augustus Sutter Jr., newly arrived from Switzerland, laid out a new city and named it Sacramento against his father's wish for a town called Sutterville.
• Sutter spent his last years petitioning Congress for restitution. In June 1880 it adjourned without acting on a bill to pay him 50,000 dollars, and he died two days later in a Washington hotel at 77.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On the Yap Islands of Micronesia, wealth once took the form of limestone disks with a hole in the center, some as small as a saucer and one 12 feet across and roughly 8,800 pounds. This episode explains how rai stones worked as money without ever needing to move. Ownership lived in a shared oral ledger: when a stone changed hands for a marriage, an inheritance, or a political alliance, the community simply updated its memory. One stone that sank in the Pacific during transport kept its full value because everyone agreed it was still there.

The stones were valuable because they were so hard to get. Yap has no calcite, so expeditions of young men sailed about 400 kilometers to Palau, bargained with local chiefs for quarry rights, carved the rock with clam shell tools, and towed it home on bamboo rafts. Many died along the way, and each stone's worth reflected the hardship in its history. The episode traces what happened when an outsider with iron tools and sailing ships removed that hardship.

• Rai stones were reserved for major transactions such as sealing marriages, securing treaties between villages, and paying ransom for the return of the dead after a battle.
• Legend says early carvers tried shapes like fish, lizards, and turtles before settling on a full moon with a central hole that let men carry the stone on a log.
• After being shipwrecked near Yap in 1871, David Dean O'Keefe paid for copra and sea cucumbers with stones quarried using iron tools. The Yapese responded by valuing his stones below older ones with harder histories.
• In 1991 Milton Friedman compared the stones to gold in the Federal Reserve vault in New York, where a 1932 transfer to France consisted of relabeling bars that never left the room.
• Japanese forces destroyed many stones during World War II for runway material and boat anchors, yet surviving stones are still exchanged for important cultural events and appear on local license plates.