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Payday loans are secured by first claim on a borrower's next paycheck, once through a post-dated check and now by electronic withdrawal, at APRs that can legally reach 400 percent in some places. Consumer agencies call it a market failure: borrowers in distress are price inelastic, so lenders charge the legal maximum, while adverse selection and fixed origination costs keep fees high and make rollovers central to the business. FDIC and Pew Charitable Trusts data show the heaviest use among people without four-year degrees, renters, African Americans, separated or divorced people and those earning under $40,000, and Pew found 69 percent of loans cover recurring costs like rent, utilities and groceries, with the average borrower in debt about five months a year.

Yet pure payday lenders average profit margins of about 3.57 percent, and the industry notes that a 20 percent APR on a one-week $100 loan earns 38 cents. One study found disaster areas served by payday lenders had fewer foreclosures and lower addiction treatment rates. Regulation varies widely. After Wonga was caught sending letters from nonexistent law firms, the UK capped costs at 0.8 percent a day and 100 percent in total; Australia set an equivalent 48 percent APR cap; in the U.S., 27 states allow the loans, nine restrict them and 14 plus Washington, D.C. forbid them, while the Military Lending Act caps loans to service members at 36 percent. Reformers propose reviving postal banking, which the U.S. ran until 1967.

• Google banned ads for loans above 36 percent APR or with terms under 60 days.
• Some Texas lenders had borrowers date checks for the day of the loan, then used them to threaten hot check charges.
• The Insight Center found payday lending pulls hundreds of millions of dollars a year from low-income communities.
• Regulatory scrutiny pushed banks like Wells Fargo to drop deposit advance programs charging the equivalent of 120 percent APR.
• The Pentagon backed the military cap because debt spirals were costing soldiers their security clearances.

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Ferruccio Lamborghini, born in 1916, founded the tractor maker Lamborghini Trattori in 1948 and expanded into boilers and air conditioners. Unhappy with the noise, roughness and weak clutches of his Ferraris, he reportedly took his complaints to Enzo Ferrari, and in May 1963 he founded Automobili Ferruccio Lamborghini in Sant'Agata Bolognese to build a refined grand tourer. He hired Giotto Bizzarrini, fresh from Ferrari, for the engine, Gian Paolo Dallara and Paolo Stanzani for the chassis and Franco Scaglione for the bodywork, then banned factory-supported racing.

Dallara, Stanzani and test driver Bob Wallace built a mid-engine chassis, the P400, after hours. Lamborghini approved a body for it on condition it never race, and it became the 1966 Miura, widely considered the first modern supercar. A 1962 visit to Don Eduardo Miura's fighting bull ranch in Seville inspired the raging bull emblem and names like Islero, Espada and Jarama, while the 1974 Countach took its name from a Piedmontese exclamation attributed to designer Nuccio Bertone. Hit by the 1973 oil crisis and troubles at his tractor business, Lamborghini sold 51 percent to Georges-Henri Rossetti in 1972 and the rest to René Leimer in 1974, then retired to make wine. The automaker went bankrupt in 1978 and passed through the Mimran brothers, Chrysler in 1987 and Malaysian and Indonesian investors before Volkswagen Group placed it under Audi in 1998.

• Lamborghini fitted his Riva Aquarama speedboat with two 4.0-liter V12 engines from his 350 GT.
• The Islero was named for a Miura bull that killed matador Manolete in 1947.
• The Countach prototype was known internally as Project 112.
• Under the Mimran brothers the company built the LM002 off-roader, nicknamed the Rambo Lambo.
• The plug-in hybrid Revuelto still uses a naturally aspirated V12.

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In 1976 Sol Price, forced out of FedMart, opened Price Club with his son Robert in former Howard Hughes airplane hangars in San Diego as a members-only warehouse for small businesses. Jim Sinegal, who started as a grocery bagger at FedMart, and attorney Jeffrey Brotman opened the first Costco in Seattle in September 1983, capping markups on business goods at 8 to 9 percent, and Costco became the first company to go from zero to $3 billion in sales in under six years. In 1993 Price Club turned down Walmart and merged with Costco as PriceCostco, which became simply Costco by 1997.

Membership fees made up 65.5 percent of net operating income in 2024, letting Costco cap markups at 14 percent, skip outside advertising and stock only about 3,700 items. Kirkland Signature, launched in 1995 and named for the former headquarters city, brought in $86 billion in 2024, often co-branded with names like Starbucks, Jelly Belly and Ocean Spray. To hold its rotisserie chicken at $4.99, Costco built its own poultry complex in Nebraska. Newer strains include a chaotic 2019 Shanghai opening followed by membership drop-offs against Alibaba and Hema, a 2023 union at a Virginia store, a 2025 strike authorization, entrance card scanners, a 2024 fee increase, and a November 2025 lawsuit seeking refunds of tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

• Sinegal reportedly told his CEO he would kill him if he raised the price of the $1.50 hot dog and soda combo.
• In 2009 Costco temporarily stopped selling Coca-Cola products over a pricing dispute.
• Costco sells an estimated $200 million in gold bars every month.
• CEO Ron Vachris, who took over in 2024, started as a forklift driver in Arizona in 1982.
• In Los Angeles, Costco broke ground on 800 apartments built on top of a warehouse.

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Developers in cities like Hangzhou offered one-kilogram gold bars, worth about 18 percent of an apartment's price, in a market with an estimated 60 to 80 million empty homes. The roots go back to a 1994 tax reform that centralized revenue and left local governments living off sales of land-use rights; land values tripled between 2005 and 2009. After 2008, localities borrowed through Local Government Financing Vehicles backed by land. Developers relied on presales, spending buyers' payments on new land rather than the units sold, and on shadow banking wealth management products promising over 10 percent. In 2020 Beijing declared that houses are for living, not for speculation, and imposed three red lines capping debt against cash, equity and assets.

By October 2021, 14 of the 30 largest developers had breached at least one line. Evergrande breached all three, missed over $83 million in offshore bond payments, and later reported about $340 billion in liabilities; regulators found it overstated revenue by $78 billion in 2019 and 2020, auditor PwC was fined $62 million, and a Hong Kong court ordered liquidation in January 2024. Country Garden and Vanke posted losses, and wealth manager Zhongzhi Enterprise Group revealed a shortfall of up to $36.5 billion. Buyers boycotted mortgages on 343 projects by September 2022. Beijing set up a 300 billion yuan facility to turn unsold homes into affordable housing and a whitelist aiming for 4 trillion yuan in project lending, as real estate fell from about 24 to 19 percent of GDP.

• Evergrande poured over $7 billion into electric vehicles and bought Guangzhou FC.
• Authorities ordered 39 buildings demolished on Evergrande's $15.5 billion Ocean Flower Island.
• Evergrande pressured its own employees to buy its wealth management products to meet sales quotas.
• By early 2024, Evergrande's offshore bonds traded at about one percent of face value.
• Local government land revenue fell 27 percent in the first quarter of 2023.

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Brothers Tom and Louis Borders, students at the University of Michigan, opened a small Ann Arbor bookshop in 1971, with 1975 seen as the turning point when they bought the inventory of an 80-year-old shop. They avoided textbooks and hired rare book manager Michael Hildebrand and restorer Harvey James Robin, who set up a bindery upstairs. Robert F. DiRomualdo arrived in 1989 to expand the chain, and in October 1992 Kmart bought Borders hoping its managers could rescue Waldenbooks; many Borders executives resigned instead. In 1995 Kmart spun off the book division as Borders Group Inc., with Waldenbooks still attached.

By 2003 there were 1,249 stores under both names, including a Puerto Rico superstore taking in $17 million a year, a store at Five World Trade Center destroyed on September 11, and Singapore's Wheelock Place, the top earner per square meter in 2006. That was the last profitable year. From 2001 to 2007 Borders.com ran on Amazon's back end, and its own site launched only in 2008, the year it took a $42.5 million loan from Pershing Square at 12.5 percent. Borders filed for Chapter 11 on February 16, 2011, with over $1.2 billion in debt, creditors rejected bids including Direct Brands' $215 million offer, and the case moved to Chapter 7 liquidation, with Barnes & Noble buying the trademarks and customer list. Al Maya Group, a UAE franchisee since 2006, bought the regional trademark rights in 2015 and still runs Borders stores in the Gulf.

• In 1994 Borders briefly ran mall toy kiosks called All Wound Up.
• Borders Rewards was free while Barnes & Noble charged an annual membership fee.
• Shares fell to 53 cents by January 2009, and former CEO George L. Jones left with over $2 million in severance.
• Borders partnered with Kobo on e-reader apps only in 2010, years after the Kindle.
• The UK and Ireland stores entered administration in 2009, while the Malaysian stores lasted independently until 2023.

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A flash crash is a rapid, deep fall in prices followed by a nearly equal recovery, and the episode argues the cause is usually not aggressive selling but a sudden withdrawal of liquidity as traders and algorithms pull their orders. On May 6, 2010, the Dow fell over 1,000 points and recovered most of it in about 15 minutes. The U.S. Department of Justice blamed Navinder Singh Sarao, a trader working largely from a suburban house, and charged him with 22 criminal counts, including fraud and market manipulation, over spoofing: placing huge sell orders and canceling them milliseconds before execution. On June 22, 2017, a legitimate multimillion-dollar sale on the GDAX exchange pushed Ethereum from about $317 to $224, triggering roughly 800 stop-loss and margin orders that drove it to 10 cents.

On May 2, 2022, a Citigroup trader in London made an input error that erased about 300 billion euros across European markets in five minutes, with Sweden down 6.8 percent, Denmark 6.7 percent and Finland 7.5 percent, and Nasdaq said the trades would stand. On October 7, 2016, the British pound fell over 6 percent in two minutes to its lowest against the dollar since 1985, possibly because news-reading algorithms reacted to hard Brexit headlines. Singapore's October 2013 crash erased $6.9 billion, and in August 2014 the exchange introduced a 20-cent minimum price, short position reporting and a 5 percent collateral levy, yet mini-crashes returned that November.

• Liquidity in modern markets is described as a mile wide but only an inch deep.
• A falling knife, unlike a flash crash, is a drop on real bad news that stays down.
• On January 2, 2019, the yen and Australian dollar moved over 4 percent in minutes, with an Apple forecast blamed even though it came an hour earlier.
• Some Singapore stocks lost up to 87 percent of their value in the 2013 crash.
• In November 2014, 40 stocks moved more than 1 percent in under a second, and another 88 did the same.

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By the late 1960s a barrel of oil hovered around $1.80, coal's share of American industry had fallen from 51 percent in 1951 to 19 percent by 1973, and U.S. oil production peaked in 1970. Nixon's 1971 price ceiling encouraged consumption, and ending the dollar's convertibility to gold cut the real value of OPEC revenue. Egypt's Anwar Sadat, Nasser's successor, allied with King Faisal of Saudi Arabia and in 1972 expelled 16,000 Soviet military personnel, an overture Henry Kissinger ignored. In April 1973 Saudi oil minister Yamani warned Kissinger, and told the Washington Post, that an embargo was possible. In October 1973 Egypt and Syria attacked Israel on Yom Kippur, the U.S. launched the Operation Nickel Grass airlift, and after Nixon sought $2.2 billion in aid for Israel, OAPEC embargoed the U.S., the UK, Canada, Japan and the Netherlands.

Prices jumped from $3 to nearly $12 a barrel. The new Federal Energy Office allocated fuel by each state's 1972 consumption, ignoring population shifts, and by late February 1974 20 percent of U.S. gas stations had no fuel; odd-even rationing, a 55 mile per hour limit and trucker blockades followed, while Japan and several European allies distanced themselves from U.S. policy. Kissinger's shuttle diplomacy secured Israeli withdrawals from parts of the Sinai and Golan Heights, and the embargo lifted in March 1974. The wealth unsettled producers too: Faisal fell into deep depression over the materialism it brought, and in November 1979 militants led by Juhayman al-Otaibi seized Mecca's Grand Mosque, citing royal corruption.

• Contractors in Jeddah hired helicopters to airlift cement off ships stuck in a gridlocked port.
• Sadat compared his diplomacy of surprise to his favorite game, backgammon.
• Nixon and Kissinger later admitted Israel had turned the battle before the airlift made an impact.
• Nigeria's leader told citizens their only problem would be managing abundance.
• Iran's Shah, secretly facing terminal cancer, rushed his Great Civilization modernization drive.

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On April 20, 2010, the Deepwater Horizon rig was drilling BP's Macondo Prospect 41 miles off Louisiana, in over 5,000 feet of water, with the well reaching another 18,000 feet into the crust. High-pressure methane breached the well, expanded up the riser and exploded on deck, killing 11 workers whose bodies were never recovered and injuring 17. The five-story blowout preventer failed: its hydraulics leaked, a critical battery was dead, and the buckled drill pipe kept the shear rams from closing. The rig sank on April 22, tearing away the riser and leaving an open wellhead a mile down.

BP first put the flow at 1,000 to 5,000 barrels a day, but the Flow Rate Technical Group found about 62,000, and internal emails showed BP's own worst-case models matched the higher figure. A 125-ton containment dome clogged with methane hydrates, a top kill of drilling mud failed, a capping stack held in July, and a relief well sealed the well in mid-September after 87 days and an estimated 4.9 million barrels. Investigators cited BP for gross negligence and willful misconduct and also faulted Halliburton's cement job and Transocean's maintenance. BP paid over $65 billion and pleaded guilty to 11 counts of felony manslaughter, two environmental misdemeanors and lying to Congress, yet no executive served prison time.

• BP sprayed about 1.84 million gallons of the dispersant Corexit, which broke oil into droplets that formed deep underwater plumes.
• Up to a third of the oil mixed with silt and settled on the seafloor.
• Infant dolphins later died at six times the normal rate, and exposed tuna and amberjack developed heart deformities.
• Coastal families reported children with severe nosebleeds and bleeding from the ears.
• A BP engineer deleted text messages showing he knew the flow rate far exceeded public estimates.

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The 1997 Asian financial crisis, nicknamed the Tom Yum Kung crisis, followed a boom in which Southeast Asia drew almost half of the capital flowing to developing countries. Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia pegged their currencies to the U.S. dollar, encouraging firms to borrow cheap dollars for real estate and politically connected projects. When Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve raised rates, the pegged currencies rose with the dollar, exports stalled amid a semiconductor slump, and Thailand ran out of reserves and floated the baht on July 2, 1997, a day after Britain handed Hong Kong to China. Indonesia's rupiah fell from about 2,600 to over 14,000 per dollar, its economy shrank 13.5 percent, and the May 1998 Jakarta riots ended Suharto's 31-year rule. In South Korea, debt crushed chaebol such as Kia Motors, and Seoul took a $58.4 billion IMF bailout.

The IMF, with figures like Stanley Fischer, demanded high interest rates, spending cuts and letting failing firms collapse, a prescription critics say deepened the recession. Malaysia's Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad refused IMF help, blamed speculators including George Soros, and imposed capital controls that trapped foreign money inside the country. Hong Kong let overnight rates briefly hit 280 percent, then spent about $15 billion buying local stocks to squeeze short sellers, later selling at a profit. China, shielded by a non-convertible renminbi, declined to devalue. Falling Asian demand pushed oil to about $11 a barrel, feeding Russia's 1998 default and Long-Term Capital Management's $4.6 billion loss. Afterward, Asian governments hoarded dollar reserves and bought U.S. Treasuries, and the episode asks whether that flood of capital helped inflate the cheap credit behind 2008.

• The IMF's first rescue effort totaled $40 billion and came with strict structural adjustment conditions.
• Jeffrey Sachs and Joseph Stiglitz described the panic as a bank run driven by asymmetric information and herd behavior.
• Estimates put crisis-linked suicides at over 10,000 across Hong Kong, Japan and South Korea.
• Many Asian economies made a V-shaped recovery by 1999.
• Russia and Brazil joined Asian nations in shifting to trade surpluses and reserve hoarding as self-insurance.

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Tower Records began in 1941 when teenager Russell Solomon sold used records in a corner of his father's Sacramento pharmacy, Tower Drugs, which shared a building with the Tower Theater. He opened his first standalone store on Watt Avenue in 1960, took over a former San Francisco grocery store in 1967 and opened the Sunset Strip store in West Hollywood in 1971, with staff acting as the general contractors. Solomon let local managers curate their own stock: the Upper West Side store near Lincoln Center served theater and classical buyers, and the Nashville store, in an old Packard dealership near Music Row, drew country stars. Monday night parties counted down to midnight Tuesday releases, and the free Pulse magazine launched in 1983.

Stores followed in the United Kingdom, Argentina, Israel, Taiwan, Singapore and Japan, starting in Sapporo in 1980, where the Shibuya store grew to nine floors. In October 2002 the Japanese branch's management bought it out, cutting it loose from the U.S. company. Debt-fueled expansion left the American business with an estimated $80 to $100 million in debt by early 2004, and in 2002 Tower, along with other retailers and labels, settled CD price-fixing lawsuits with 41 states built around minimum advertised pricing rules, paying a $3 million fine. Chapter 11 filings came in 2004 and August 2006, a liquidation firm won the assets in October 2006, and the last U.S. stores closed that December.

• In 1976 Solomon added adjacent spaces selling books, posters and even house plants.
• Investigators found consumers were overcharged nearly half a billion dollars on CDs between 1995 and 2000, up to $5 per album.
• Best Buy and Target sold CDs at a loss to pull shoppers toward televisions and appliances.
• The Boston flagship at Newbury Street and Mass Ave became a Best Buy and later a TJ Maxx.
• The brand returned online in 2020 and opened Tower Labs, an artist event space in Brooklyn, in 2022.