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The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, Freddie Mac, was created by the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1970 to compete with Fannie Mae, which had been privatized in 1968 and was the only big buyer of mortgages. Freddie Mac does not lend to homebuyers. It buys loans from banks, bundles them into mortgage-backed securities for global investors and charges a guarantee fee to promise timely payments. The securities stated they were not backed by the U.S. government, but its congressional charter and Treasury credit line created an implicit guarantee, worth about $6.5 billion a year to the GSEs according to a 1996 Congressional Budget Office estimate.

After 2001, private-label securitizers grew by packaging subprime and Alt-A loans, and Freddie Mac, answering to shareholders, began guaranteeing nontraditional adjustable-rate mortgages that relied on rising prices. When prices fell after 2006, defaults overwhelmed it. On September 7, 2008, the Federal Housing Finance Agency placed Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae in conservatorship, Treasury committed up to $100 billion in senior preferred stock at a 10 percent dividend, the stock fell to about $1, and it was delisted in 2010. The GSEs had drawn leaders such as Kenneth Duberstein, Franklin Raines and Jamie Gorelick, and reform bills in 2003 and 2005 stalled. In 2025 it reported $23.27 billion in revenue and $10.73 billion in net income.

• Banks that sell loans to Freddie Mac get fresh cash to make new loans.
• Banks could hold GSE debt toward their capital reserve requirements.
• Top campaign recipients included Roy Blunt, Bob Bennett, Chris Dodd, John Kerry and Barack Obama.
• A 2005 Senate reform bill from Chuck Hagel, Elizabeth Dole and John Sununu was later co-sponsored by John McCain.
• Since 1971 its weekly Primary Mortgage Market Survey has reported average 30-year and 15-year fixed rates, now drawn from its underwriting systems.

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John C. Bogle's 1951 Princeton thesis found that mutual fund managers rarely beat market indexes over time and that fees ate any edge. He joined Wellington Management that year, became president in 1967 and CEO in 1970, but a 1966 merger with a Boston fund group went badly and he was fired in 1974, later calling his conduct inexcusable. He negotiated a separate administrative unit named Vanguard after Horatio Nelson's flagship at the Battle of the Nile, barred from managing money. Following Paul Samuelson's call for an S&P 500 fund, he launched the First Index Investment Trust in 1976. Underwriters hoped for $150 million and raised $11 million.

Brokers ignored a fund that paid no commissions, and after a year it held $17 million until Bogle merged in a struggling Wellington fund to near $100 million. The 1982 bull market proved the low-cost model, and Vanguard was structured so its funds own the management company, which runs at cost. It added the first bond index fund for individuals in 1986. Bogle stepped down as chairman at 70 in 1999 and criticized the firm's push into ETFs, which invite frequent trading. By 2025 Vanguard managed $13.3 trillion, bought Altruist for $4 billion, and opened its platform to crypto ETFs after blocking Bitcoin ETFs in early 2024.

• Bogle won the Vanguard name by noting it would sit next to Wellington in newspaper fund tables.
• Rival index funds carrying standard high fees left Vanguard dominant in low-cost investing.
• Successors included Jack Brennan, Bill McNabb, Tim Buckley and Salim Ramji.
• In 2021 Vanguard joined a net zero pledge while holding $86 billion in coal, the largest coal investor worldwide.
• A 2025 UN report on Gaza named Vanguard as a major investor in firms including Lockheed Martin, Elbit Systems and Palantir.

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Fidelity Investments is privately owned: parent FMR LLC is about 40 percent held by CEO Abigail Johnson and her family and 60 percent by current and former employees. In mid-2026 it had $7.8 trillion in assets under management and $19.9 trillion under administration, and 2025 revenue reached $37.7 billion with 80,000 employees and retirement plans for over 28,800 businesses. Founded in 1930 as the Fidelity Fund and restructured by Edward C. Johnson II in 1946, it moved into 401(k) plans in 1982 as pensions gave way, launched computerized trading in 1984, and became the first mutual fund company with a web page. After Abigail Johnson became CEO in 2014, it introduced zero-fee index funds in 2018.

The private structure lets Fidelity accept short-term losses and keeps its finances out of public filings. A 2016 Reuters investigation found executives buying private shares in startups such as Alibaba at seven cents before Fidelity funds bought in. The SEC fined it $2 million in 2004 after branch managers had staff alter and destroy client documents to pass compliance inspections. From 2006 to 2008 traders took private flights, Super Bowl and Wimbledon tickets, concerts and rare wine from Jefferies salespeople seeking its order flow, leading to more than $53 million in fines. In January 2025 FINRA fined it $600,000 after an employee took $750,000 from international clients over eight years.

• Fidelity runs a stablecoin on Ethereum called the Fidelity Digital Dollar.
• Zero-fee index funds act as a loss leader that brings investors into its wider ecosystem of paid services.
• Family and executive direct investments include Boston's Seaport Center, telecom networks and lumber companies.
• In 2007 it was fined over misleading sales literature for Destiny plans aimed at military personnel.
• Federal regulators penalized it in 2025 for taking weeks to process trades that should have taken days.

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In 1955 physicist William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California, to build a hard-to-manufacture four-layer diode. His erratic management drove eight researchers, including Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Jean Hoerni, to leave. Noyce pitched Sherman Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instrument on silicon over germanium, and in 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was born in an early form of venture capital. Its first product, the 2N697 mesa transistor, sold to IBM at $150 each for the B-70 bomber program, and Autonetics used it in Minuteman missile guidance. Hoerni's planar process then sealed flat junctions under silicon dioxide, and in 1960 Noyce built the first commercially practical integrated circuit.

Fairchild grew from 12 employees to 12,000 and $130 million in sales. In 1965 it opened an assembly plant on the Navajo Nation at Shiprock, New Mexico, employing over a thousand Navajos, mostly women, and marketing the work as akin to rug weaving; it closed in 1975. The parent company in Syosset, New York, visited once a year, spent semiconductor profits elsewhere and withheld stock options. Charles Sporck left for National Semiconductor in 1967, the year of a $7.6 million loss, and Noyce and Moore founded Intel in 1968. Federico Faggin took silicon gate technology to Intel in 1970, and Motorola's suit over Lester Hogan's hires failed for lack of provable damages.

• Jack Kilby's earlier chip at Texas Instruments used hand-soldered gold wires, while Noyce's used deposited metal films.
• Fairchild made the first commercial CCD image sensor in 1973.
• Its 1976 Channel F was the first home console with interchangeable ROM cartridges, soon overtaken by the Atari 2600.
• It passed to Schlumberger in 1979, National Semiconductor in 1987, independence in 1997 and ON Semiconductor for $2.4 billion in 2016.
• Its alumni founded or led Intel, AMD, National Semiconductor and LSI Logic, and Silicon Valley entered print in 1971.

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Experian is an Irish multinational credit bureau and data broker based in Dublin and listed in the FTSE 100, with almost $8.5 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue and nearly 22,000 employees. It traces to Credit Data Corporation, bought in 1968 by aerospace and automotive firm TRW. In November 1996 TRW sold the unit to Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners, who sold it a month later to Great Universal Stores, a British retailer whose customers bought on installment credit. GUS merged it with its CCN business and spun Experian off on the London Stock Exchange in October 2006. Its Mosaic tool sorts the UK population into 15 groups and 89 types such as Golden Empty Nesters.

In 2005 Experian settled FTC charges that FreeCreditReport.com enrolled people in monitoring costing almost $80. In 2013 prosecutors charged Hieu Minh Ngo, who had posed as a private investigator to buy data from Experian subsidiary Court Ventures. A breach of systems serving T-Mobile, open from September 2013 to September 2015, affected up to 15 million people. A 2020 South African breach exposed 4 million people and nearly 800,000 businesses, and in 2021 data on 220 million Brazilians linked to Serasa Experian was sold on the dark web, though Experian said its systems showed no compromise. A late 2022 URL flaw exposed credit reports until early 2023.

• Labour used Mosaic first, and the Conservatives used it to target swing voters in the 2015 general election.
• The CFPB fined Experian $3 million in March 2017 over the credit scores it sold.
• In October 2025 the Dutch Data Protection Authority fined it 2.7 million euros, and it shut down in the Netherlands.
• A Nebraska customer's lawsuit over a $24.99 double charge was moved to federal court and settled before trial.
• It agreed to buy Brazilian fraud firm ClearSale for $350 million in 2024 and launched a Cash Flow Data Bureau in October 2026.

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Evergreen Marine Corporation was founded in Taiwan on September 1, 1968, by Chang Yung-fa with a single cargo ship, the Central Trust, offering a go-anywhere service. A second ship joined in 1969 for Middle East routes, and a U.S. office opened in 1974. The parent rebranded as Evergreen International SA in 1981, and in 1984 the company launched a round-the-world service in both directions. Acquisitions followed: Uniglory Marine in 1984, Italia Marittima in 1993, whose lineage runs back to Österreichischer Lloyd in 1835, and Britain's Hatsu Marine in 2002. In 2007 its divisions merged as the Evergreen Line. By 2023 it ranked seventh among the world's shipping companies, with over 150 ships calling at 240 ports.

Containers come in Evergreen green, Uniglory orange and white refrigerated units that reflect heat. Ships grew from the 646-TEU Everspring class of the 1970s to the Ever Ace, delivered in July 2021 as the world's largest container ship at nearly 24,000 TEU. In 2009, during a recession, Evergreen announced 100 new vessels, and orders now run to 2030. The mishaps are well known: the Ever Laurel lost a container of nearly 30,000 bath toys in the Pacific in 1992, the Ever Given blocked the Suez Canal for nearly a week in March 2021, and the Ever Forward grounded in Chesapeake Bay in March 2022 for over a month.

• Oceanographers used the spilled yellow ducks for decades to map ocean currents.
• The Ever Forward refloating invoked general average, under which all cargo owners share salvage costs.
• In January 2019 the Ever Summit struck a crane at a port, with no injuries.
• On August 1, 2025, the Ever Lunar lost about 50 containers near Callao, Peru, during a tsunami warning.
• The group founded EVA Air in 1989 and UNI Air in 1998, and runs hubs at Taichung, Kaohsiung and Colón, Panama.

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Equifax began in Atlanta in 1899 as the Retail Credit Company, founded by brothers Cator and Guy Woolford to provide risk reports for insurers and employers. By the 1960s its local inspectors were interviewing landlords, grocers and employers and filing rumors about people's marriages, sex lives and politics, with negative findings rewarded. When the files were computerized around 1970, public outrage and congressional hearings produced the Fair Credit Reporting Act, and in 1975 the company renamed itself Equifax. It grew into one of the big three credit bureaus, with $5 billion or more in 2024 revenue, over 14,000 employees and data on more than 800 million consumers and 88 million businesses.

In late 2016 a researcher found an exposed employee portal, which stayed open for six months. Between May and July 2017 attackers exploited a known Apache Struts flaw, stayed inside the network for 134 days and took records of about 147.9 million Americans. The U.S. Justice Department indicted four members of China's People's Liberation Army, and China denied it. An Argentine portal used admin as both username and password, the official site served malware, and the IRS suspended a $7.2 million contract. Former CIO Jun Ying and manager Sudhakar Reddy Bonthu pleaded guilty to insider trading. Promised $125 payouts from a $700 million settlement were diluted, while class lawyers received about $77.5 million.

• Its acquisitions include Anakam, a pioneer of SMS two-factor authentication, and Veda in Australia.
• The Work Number sells salary and employment histories to banks, background checkers and agencies.
• Consumers filed over 57,000 complaints with the CFPB between October 2012 and September 2017.
• Julie Miller of Oregon won an $18.6 million jury award after her file was merged with a stranger's, later reduced by a judge.
• In 2022 Equifax sent miscalculated scores to lenders the same week CEO Mark Begor received a $25 million package.

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In 1994 Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen founded DreamWorks SKG, the first new major Hollywood studio since 1928. Their pact promised fewer than nine films a year, freedom to work elsewhere and being home for dinner. Each put in $33 million, Paul Allen added $500 million and Miky Lee of South Korea's CJ Group $300 million. Based on the Universal lot, they launched television with ABC, producing Spin City; DreamWorks Interactive with Microsoft, which made Medal of Honor; and DreamWorks Records, signing George Michael, Eels, Papa Roach and Nelly Furtado. The games unit went to Electronic Arts in 2000 and the label to Universal Music in 2003.

Saving Private Ryan lost Best Picture to Miramax's Shakespeare in Love at the 1999 Oscars amid talk of a Harvey Weinstein campaign. DreamWorks then won three straight Best Pictures with American Beauty, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind, yet Geffen said it nearly went bankrupt twice. Sinbad lost $125 million, and unsold Shrek 2 DVDs forced write-downs. Animation was spun off in a 2004 IPO, a roughly $1.5 billion NBC Universal deal collapsed when GE sought about $100 million off, and Viacom bought the live-action studio for $1.6 billion in 2006. A Paramount speech at the Dreamgirls premiere preceded a 2008 split funded by $1.2 billion from India's Reliance.

• Spielberg insisted the DreamWorks logo appear before Paramount's on co-productions.
• From 2011 to 2016 its films were released through Disney's Touchstone Pictures banner.
• Flops such as Cowboys and Aliens and I Am Number Four cut output to three films a year.
• In 2015 DreamWorks Pictures became a label for adult-themed films inside Amblin Partners, distributed by Universal.
• The live-action company now licenses the DreamWorks name and boy-on-the-moon logo from DreamWorks Animation.

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Celebration is a town in Osceola County, Florida, built by the Disney Development Company on roughly 4,900 acres at an estimated cost of $2.5 billion. CEO Michael Eisner saw it as a nod to Walt Disney's unbuilt vision of EPCOT as a real city, but planners Jaquelin T. Robertson and Robert A.M. Stern looked backward, using New Urbanism and New Classical architecture. Houses sat close to the street with mandatory front porches and hidden garages, linked by 23 miles of trails. A pattern book limited buyers to styles such as Classical, Victorian and Colonial Revival. Michael Graves designed the post office, Philip Johnson the welcome center, and Michael Bierut the street signs and manhole covers.

A lottery decided who could buy the first 350 homes and 123 apartments in 1996. Disney advertised to Black and Hispanic buyers, but the 2000 census found Celebration 88 percent white against 59 percent for Osceola County, with no subsidized housing in town; Disney instead gave the county $900,000. Celebration is a census-designated place run through community development districts and homeowner associations. Disney sold off its control, and by 2004 Lexin Capital held the town center. In 2016 the Wall Street Journal reported condo owners suing over $15 to $20 million in deferred repairs, with leaking roofs, mold and balconies propped up with two-by-fours.

• Winter events feature soap flakes pumped from hidden machines to imitate snow.
• By the 2020 census the town had over 11,000 residents, about 74 percent white and 15 percent Hispanic.
• The resort-style AdventHealth hospital is adding a five-story tower that will bring it to 427 beds.
• The Great American Pie Festival held in the town was televised on Food Network.
• Crashes into retention ponds along World Drive forced new barriers after the fact.

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Delbert Eugene Webb was born on May 17, 1899, in Fresno, California, to fruit farmer Ernest and Henrietta Webb. He dropped out of high school, worked as a carpenter and ship fitter, and married nurse Hazel Lenora Church in 1919. Typhoid fever at 28 sent him to Phoenix, where he formed the Del E. Webb Construction Company in 1928. In 1942 the federal government hired his firm to build the Poston War Relocation Center in Arizona, one of ten camps where Japanese Americans were detained. Construction began March 27, 1942, and about 5,000 laborers on double shifts finished a facility for more than 17,000 people in 21 days.

In 1946 Benjamin Bugsy Siegel hired Webb as general contractor for the Flamingo in Las Vegas, and when Webb grew alarmed at Siegel's talk of killings, Siegel assured him the mob only killed its own. Webb later owned the Sahara and the Mint, becoming Nevada's largest casino owner aside from Howard Hughes. With Dan Topping and Larry MacPhail he bought the New York Yankees in 1945 for $2.8 million; over 20 seasons the team reached 15 World Series and won 10 before CBS paid $11.2 million in 1964. On January 1, 1960, he opened Sun City, Arizona, and 100,000 people came the first weekend. He died in Rochester, Minnesota, on July 4, 1974.

• Webb and Topping bought out MacPhail in 1947 and took full control of the Yankees.
• Pueblo Gardens in Tucson, built in 1948, combined 600 houses with a shopping center.
• San Manuel, Arizona, was a company town for Magma Copper with streets, schools, a hospital and parks.
• Sun City opened with five home models, a shopping center, a recreation center and a golf course, and Webb made the cover of Time in August 1962.
• He was posthumously elected to the Gaming Hall of Fame in 2000.