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Transcontinental and Western Air was formed in 1930 when Postmaster General Walter Folger Brown pressured Transcontinental Air Transport and Western Air Express to merge so larger carriers could handle airmail contracts. Marketed as the Lindbergh Line, it faced a crisis on March 31, 1931, when a TWA Fokker F-10 crashed in a Kansas wheat field, killing all eight aboard, including Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne; moisture had degraded the hide glue in its wooden wing. Locked out of the Boeing 247 by United, TWA asked Douglas for a new metal plane, which produced the DC-1, the DC-2 and, by 1937, the DC-3. Howard Hughes took control in the early 1940s, partnered with Lockheed on the pressurized Constellation, and turned the renamed Trans World Airlines into a second American flag carrier alongside Pan Am.

Hughes forced out Jack Frye in 1947, then ordered more than $400 million in jets; lenders made him put his stock in a voting trust in 1960, and he sold out in 1966 for over half a billion dollars. By 1969 TWA had passed Pan Am in transatlantic passengers and opened Eero Saarinen's Flight Center at JFK. Hijackings and bombings between 1969 and 1986, oil shocks and the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act exposed its weak domestic feeder network. Carl Icahn took control in 1985 and took the airline private in 1988, adding over half a billion dollars in debt, sold the London Heathrow routes to American Airlines in 1990, and on leaving in 1993 secured the Karabu deal, letting his company buy TWA tickets at a 45 percent discount, estimated to cost TWA about $150 million a year. After bankruptcies in 1992 and 1995 and the loss of all 230 people on TWA Flight 800 in 1996, a third filing in 2001 ended with American Airlines acquiring its assets.

• TWA asked Douglas for a 12-passenger metal plane that could fly over 1,000 miles and cross mountain routes on one engine.
• During World War II, TWA flew thousands of transatlantic logistics missions for the U.S. military.
• TWA lost over $14 million in 1946 as its pilots went on strike.
• In 1958 TWA hired Margaret Grant, becoming the first major airline to employ an African American flight attendant.
• Saarinen's 1962 terminal at JFK has been restored as the TWA Hotel, with a vintage Constellation bar on the tarmac.

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Sebastian S. Kresge sold tinware to all 19 of Frank Winfield Woolworth's stores before putting his $6,700 life savings into a five-and-dime with John G. McCrory in Memphis in 1897. He built the chain from Detroit and incorporated the S.S. Kresge Company with 85 stores in 1912. In 1962 executive Harry Cunningham opened the first Kmart, a small test store in San Fernando, California, followed by an 80,000-square-foot store in Michigan, the same year Sam Walton opened his first Walmart; both men had been inspired by the New England retailer Ann & Hope. Kmart spread quickly through the suburbs, adding the Blue Light Special in 1965, in-store cafes, restaurant co-branding and lines from Martha Stewart and Jaclyn Smith.

In November 1990 Walmart passed Kmart, having invested in barcode scanning and satellite inventory tracking while Kmart managers still ordered by clipboard. Kmart paid high dividends, bought Sports Authority and Waldenbooks, and opened Big Kmart and Super Kmart stores its supply chain could not keep stocked. It filed for Chapter 11 in January 2002 with more than 2,100 stores and about 275,000 employees, and CEO Charles Conaway, who had accepted a $5 million loan, stepped down. Hedge fund manager Edward Lampert of ESL Investments turned its debt into control and in 2004 merged it with Sears in an $11 billion deal, then focused on real estate as stores decayed. Sears Holdings went bankrupt in 2018, and by 2026 only three Kmarts remained, in Guam, the US Virgin Islands and Miami.

• The Blue Light Special began as a way for managers to clear surplus stock through 15-minute flash sales.
• Wendy's and Little Caesars counters operated inside some stores alongside Kmart's own cafes.
• A data breach in October 2014 exposed customers' debit and credit card information.
• Sears Holdings spun off legacy brands such as Craftsman and Lands' End for cash.
• Remaining assets passed in 2019 to Transformco, also controlled by Lampert, and the last full-size mainland Kmart closed in 2024.

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In the late 1940s St. Louis had more than 85,000 families crowded into deteriorating tenements, and a 1947 survey found 33,000 homes relying on communal outdoor toilets. With its tax base shrinking and the Federal Housing Act of 1949 offering support, the city pursued slum clearance and hired Minoru Yamasaki, who proposed a mix of mid-rise buildings, walk-ups and a few high-rises with open space. Federal officials capped buildings at 11 stories and required 50 units per acre, denser than the slums being cleared, producing 33 identical towers on 57 acres for $36 million. Pruitt opened in 1954 and Igoe in 1955, planned as segregated but integrated after a Supreme Court ruling, and one early tenant called her unit a poor man's penthouse.

Value engineering shrank apartments, eliminated balconies and landscaping, and installed skip-stop elevators serving only floors 1, 4, 7 and 10, with bare galleries meant as streets in the sky. Federal law paid for construction but required tenant rents to cover all operations and maintenance, so as St. Louis lost 30 percent of its population and 11,000 manufacturing jobs, vacancies rose, upkeep was cut and rents climbed from a $20 minimum in 1952 to $58 by 1968. A nine-month rent strike in 1969 forced the housing authority board to resign, but by 1970 23 of the 33 buildings were abandoned, and the first was imploded on television on March 16, 1972. Charles Jencks called it the day modern architecture died and Oscar Newman built his defensible space theory on it, while Katharine Bristol and Eugene Meehan argued policy, not design, doomed it.

• Planners had projected St. Louis would grow to a million people by 1970.
• Rent increases left some families spending up to 75 percent of their income on housing.
• Studies, including work by sociologist Lee Rainwater, found the worst vandalism and violent crime came mostly from outsiders and transients.
• The site had no ground-floor businesses and not even public mailboxes.
• Yamasaki said he regretted the project and later designed the World Trade Center towers.

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From 1834 to 1836 the United States boomed on silver from trade with Mexico and China, federal revenue from public land sales and tariffs, and British capital marketed through Anglo-American houses such as Baring Brothers to buy state bonds for canals and roads, all resting on cotton exports that earned British pounds. In 1836 the Bank of England, alarmed by falling specie reserves, raised its rate from 3 to 5 percent, forcing American banks to follow and freezing credit. Cotton prices then fell 25 percent in February and March 1837, while the Hessian fly and winter kill ruined the American wheat crop just as Europe enjoyed strong harvests and stopped buying.

At home, Andrew Jackson's 1832 veto of the Second Bank of the United States recharter freed state banks to lend loosely, and his 1836 Specie Circular required gold or silver for western land purchases, pulling coin out of East Coast banks as the Deposit and Distribution Act moved federal funds into so-called pet banks. On May 10, 1837, New York banks suspended specie payments. Of roughly 850 banks, 343 closed and 62 failed partially, deflation lasted until about 1844, defaulting states were locked out of international markets for a decade, and Martin Van Buren, inaugurated five weeks before the panic, refused federal relief. Recovery finally came after gold was discovered in California in 1848.

• New York bank losses neared $100 million within two months of the suspension.
• New Orleans was paralyzed and plantations went out of cultivation, while Ohio, Indiana and Illinois held out until prices collapsed in 1839.
• A false recovery in 1838 ended when the Bank of England and Dutch creditors raised rates again.
• Rioting by the unemployed in major cities helped push the creation of more professional police forces.
• Even during the depression, railroads expanded, pig iron output grew and coal began replacing wood.

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On March 23, 1989, the Exxon Valdez left the Valdez Marine Terminal at 9:12 p.m. carrying 53.1 million gallons of Prudhoe Bay crude. Captain Joseph Hazelwood steered out of the outbound lane to avoid ice from the Columbia Glacier, set the autopilot and went to his cabin at about 11:47 p.m., leaving third mate Gregory Cousins, who had already worked six hours and chose not to wake the second mate, as the only officer on the bridge against company policy. At 12:04 a.m. the ship grounded on Bligh Reef, puncturing eight of 11 cargo tanks, and 10.8 million gallons eventually spilled into Prince William Sound. The NTSB found that failing to provide a rested and sufficient crew was a widespread practice.

Exxon blamed Hazelwood, but at his 1990 trial 21 witnesses said he did not appear intoxicated, and he was convicted only of a misdemeanor for negligent discharge of oil. The ship's Raytheon collision avoidance radar had been broken for over a year, and the Coast Guard had stopped tracking ships as far out as Bligh Reef. Cleanup recovered only about 10 percent of the oil; the dispersant Corexit, containing 2-butoxyethanol, was linked to illness among workers, and hot water blasting sterilized the shoreline. A $5 billion punitive award in Exxon v. Baker was cut through years of appeals until the Supreme Court set it at $507.5 million in 2008, relying on an 1818 maritime precedent. The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 phased in double-hull tankers.

• Up to 250,000 seabirds, at least 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 247 bald eagles and 22 orcas died.
• In 2014 federal scientists estimated 16,000 to 21,000 gallons of oil remained under the beaches, with the consistency of mayonnaise.
• To back Exxon's $4.8 billion credit line, JPMorgan bought protection from the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, an early credit default swap.
• The Chugach Alaska Corporation filed for Chapter 11 in 1991, and the village of Chenega tripled in population as a staging base.
• Renamed several times, including Sea River Mediterranean, the ship ended as an ore carrier and was dismantled in India in 2012.

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This episode challenges the popular account that the 2008 crash was caused by government policy pushing banks to lend to low-income buyers. The global pool of fixed income savings doubled from about $35 trillion in 2000 to $70 trillion in 2008, much of it from China, India and Middle Eastern oil states, while the Federal Reserve held the federal funds rate at 1 percent for over a year after the dot-com bust and 9/11. Hungry for yield, that money flowed into mortgage-backed securities whose top tranches were rated AAA. By 2007 the shadow banking system of investment banks, hedge funds and money market funds held about $62 trillion in assets against $39 trillion in traditional banks, funding itself each night through repurchase agreements backed by those securities.

In 1998 Commodity Futures Trading Commission chair Brooksley Born pushed to regulate over-the-counter derivatives and was opposed by Alan Greenspan, Robert Rubin and Arthur Levitt, after which Congress passed a law preventing her agency from regulating those markets. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission concluded the Community Reinvestment Act was not a factor, and research cited here shows the biggest growth in mortgage debt came from borrowers in the middle and top of the credit score range, including speculators buying second, third and fourth homes. When Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008, the repo market froze. The episode then explains the balance sheet recession that followed, contrasts US quantitative easing with European austerity, and traces political effects including Brexit.

• Only about 12 economists publicly predicted the housing collapse from the data between 2000 and 2006.
• US household debt rose from 77 percent of disposable personal income in 1990 to 127 percent at the end of 2007.
• The official recession lasted 19 months, from December 2007 to June 2009, and Robert Kuttner called the era the Lesser Depression.
• Median household wealth fell 35 percent between 2005 and 2011, from over $106,000 to about $68,000.
• China, India, Indonesia and Oceania largely escaped the worst of the downturn.

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In 1899 engineer James Ward Packard complained about his car to its maker, Alexander Winton, who told him to build his own. James and his brother William built their first car in Warren, Ohio, late that year, and Henry Bourne Joy brought in Detroit investors and moved the company to Detroit by 1902. Albert Kahn designed a 40-acre reinforced concrete plant whose Building 10 brought more than 80 trades under one roof. Packards started at $2,600 when the Oldsmobile runabout sold for about $650, and under Alvan Macauley the brand became one of the three P's of American luxury with Peerless and Pierce-Arrow, advertised with the line Ask the Man Who Owns One. By 1931 the Imperial House of Japan owned 10 of them.

Shared components helped Packard survive the Depression, and the under-$1,000 Packard 120 of 1935 tripled sales but diluted the brand. In World War II it built Rolls-Royce Merlin V-1650 engines for the P-51 Mustang and V-12 engines for PT boats, more than 55,000 combat engines in all, and ended the war with about $33 million in assets. It then fielded the bulky 1948 styling nicknamed the pregnant elephant, kept flathead straight eights while Cadillac moved to an overhead valve V8, and spent heavily on its own Ultramatic transmission. Former Hotpoint executive James Nance merged with Studebaker in 1954 and launched a V8 and Torsion-Level suspension for 1955, but body supplier Briggs had gone to Chrysler and quality suffered. The last Detroit Packard was built on June 25, 1956.

• By the early 1950s the board's average age was 67, partly because executives had no pension plan.
• Nance's first act was creating a pension plan, and he moved mid-priced models under the Clipper name.
• Studebaker's multi-story South Bend plants needed about 250,000 sales a year to break even.
• The 1957 and 1958 Studebaker-based cars were mocked as Packardbakers, and 1958 sales totaled 2,622 before production ended on July 16, 1958.
• Packard's electrical connector division became part of GM's Delphi, which evolved into Aptiv.

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After the 1973 oil embargo quadrupled prices, oil exporters deposited huge petrodollar profits in Western commercial banks, which recycled them as syndicated loans to Latin American governments on the belief that countries do not go bankrupt, with the IMF's endorsement. Mexico borrowed in US dollars against expected oil revenue, and between 1975 and 1982 the region's commercial bank debt grew more than 20 percent a year, lifting total external debt from about $75 billion in 1975 to over $315 billion by 1983, around half of regional GDP. A global recession, a second oil spike and a sharp drop in world trade in 1981 followed, and Paul Volcker's interest rate increases from 1979 raised payments on variable-rate, dollar-denominated loans as the dollar strengthened against local currencies.

In August 1982 Mexican finance minister Jesús Silva Herzog announced a 90-day moratorium, and banks halted new lending to the region and refused to roll over short-term loans. Between 1982 and 1985 Latin America paid $108 billion in debt service while per capita GDP shrank almost 9 percent, real urban wages fell 20 to 40 percent over the decade, and capital flight, hyperinflation and half-built infrastructure followed. IMF rescues required structural adjustment: abandoning import substitution industrialization, opening markets, privatizing and imposing austerity, which critics said put Western banks ahead of citizens. Brazilian officials vowed never again to sign IMF agreements, and in 1988 the Paris Club concluded the debt was unpayable and allowed the first partial write-offs.

• Syndicated loans let groups of banks pool money and share the risk on very large projects such as hydroelectric dams.
• Banks believed short-term loans protected them because they could simply decline to renew them.
• The US banking exposure threatened to wipe out the collective banking profits made since the nation's founding.
• Chile and Costa Rica adopted slightly more reformist approaches than the standard IMF mandate.
• By 2015 Brazil owed over $535 billion in external debt and Mexico over $438 billion.

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Tommy Hilfiger was born in 1951 in Elmira, New York, the second of nine children of a watchmaker and a nurse, and grew up with severe dyslexia. In 1971, after a summer job at a Cape Cod clothing store, he put $150 of savings into People's Place, an Elmira shop selling bell bottoms bought in New York City alongside a hair salon, a record shop and rock concerts in the basement. The store went bankrupt in 1977. He moved to New York, took commerce classes, worked for labels including Jordache, and spent weeks in factories in India learning production, which he later called his real design school. In 1984 Mohan Murjani hired him, first for a Coca-Cola clothing line, then backed his own label in 1985.

The launch featured a George Lois billboard in Times Square styled as a hangman puzzle that set Hilfiger beside Ralph Lauren, Perry Ellis and Calvin Klein. With backing from Silas Chou and former Ralph Lauren executives, the company went public in 1992, sponsored tours for Pete Townshend, Sheryl Crow, Britney Spears and Lenny Kravitz, and was embraced by hip-hop, with Aaliyah as a 1997 spokesperson. In 1999 it was named in a class action over sweatshop conditions in Saipan, where goods could be labeled Made in USA without federal minimum wage rules, and it settled with other manufacturers in March 2000. Apax Partners bought the brand for $1.6 billion in 2005 and sold it to PVH for $3 billion in 2010, with Hilfiger staying on as principal designer.

• Snoop Dogg wore an oversized Tommy rugby shirt on Saturday Night Live in 1994, and it sold out across New York City the next morning.
• Hilfiger won the CFDA's menswear designer of the year award in 1995.
• The company acquired Jennifer Lopez's Sweetface line in 2003 and launched the True Star fragrance with Beyoncé in 2004.
• CBS aired his business and design competition show The Cut in 2005.
• He received the CFDA's Geoffrey Beene Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012 and published the memoir American Dreamer in 2016.

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Facing the Volkswagen Beetle and compacts from AMC and Studebaker, Chevrolet general manager Ed Cole launched the Corvair in late 1959 as a 1960 model, and it was named Motor Trend's 1960 Car of the Year. Where the Ford Falcon and Plymouth Valiant simply shrank conventional cars, the Corvair used unibody construction, an air-cooled flat-six with aluminum parts mounted behind the rear wheels, a transaxle, a flat cabin floor and independent suspension at all four wheels, for under $2,000. The Monza trim, added in spring 1960 with bucket seats and later a four-speed floor shifter, made up about half of sales by 1961, nudged Ford toward the Mustang, and in 1962 the Monza Spider became only the second production car with a factory turbocharger.

The first-generation swing axle could let the inside rear wheel tuck under in hard cornering, causing oversteer. Engineers wanted a front anti-roll bar, but management rejected it to save about $4 a car and specified 15 psi front and 26 psi rear tire pressures instead. Ralph Nader's 1965 Unsafe at Any Speed devoted its first chapter to the 1960 to 1963 cars, drawing on documents from more than 100 lawsuits, just as the redesigned 1965 Corvair arrived with Corvette-derived rear suspension that Car and Driver praised. Sales fell by more than half in 1966, GM halted development in favor of the Camaro, and production ended in May 1969 at Willow Run. In 1972 an NHTSA report based on Texas A&M tests found the early cars no more prone to loss of control or rollover than their contemporaries.

• A mechanic topping up soft front tires to 26 psi could unknowingly remove the understeer the pressures were meant to create.
• The Mustang offered V8s up to 271 horsepower against the Corvair's 180-horsepower turbocharged six.
• The final 6,000 Corvairs were built almost by hand in an offline room at the Willow Run plant.
• NHTSA's tests used steering robots on a 1963 Corvair alongside a Falcon, Valiant, Beetle and Renault Dauphine.
• Don Yenko modified 100 Corvairs in a month to create the championship-winning Stinger, and the engine found a second life in experimental aircraft.