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Levi Strauss, a German Jewish immigrant, went to San Francisco in 1853 to run a West Coast branch of his brother's dry goods business. A customer, the Reno tailor Jacob Davis, solved miners' torn pockets by hammering in copper rivets but lacked the roughly $68 to file a patent. Strauss fronted it, and on May 20, 1873 the two received U.S. patent 139,121. Lot number 501 arrived in 1890, the year the patent lapsed, though the reason for the number burned with the company's records in the 1906 earthquake. An $87,000 pair found in a New Mexico mine carries a label from the Chinese Exclusion Act era reading "the only kind made by white labor," a policy Levi's reversed in the 1890s.

Wartime metal rules removed the crotch rivet that burned cowboys by campfires, and back pocket rivets that scratched furniture gave way to bar tacks. Shrink-to-fit 501s became a youth uniform, and after the 1957 Moscow youth festival jeans fueled a Soviet black market; a 1979 Soviet manufacturing deal collapsed after Afghanistan. Globalization brought a 1991 Northern Mariana Islands case the Labor Department called slave-like, a 1990 San Antonio closure that sparked Fuerza Unida protests, and the last U.S. factory closing in 2003. Levi's filed nearly 100 suits over its back pocket arcs, won in Guangzhou in 2019, listed on the NYSE that year at a $6.6 billion valuation, and turned to waterless finishing, cottonized hemp and laser fading.

• The rivet patent gave Strauss and Davis a legal monopoly on the design for nearly two decades.
• Western sailors and diplomats smuggled jeans into the USSR, where a pair could fetch an engineer's monthly salary.
• A subcontractor, Tan Holdings, was ordered to pay over $9 million in restitution in the 1991 case.
• In 2017 Levi's and Google released a $350 jacket with touch-sensitive threads woven into the sleeve.
• When FIFA covered Levi's Stadium branding for the 2026 World Cup, the company changed its profile pictures to the blocked-out logo.

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Adolf "Adi" Dassler began making sports shoes in his mother's scullery in Herzogenaurach, Germany, after World War I, scavenging tent canvas and rubber. His older brother Rudolf joined in 1924 to form the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory, where a stationary bicycle powered the leather mill when electricity failed. Adi swapped heavy leather and metal spikes for light canvas and thin rubber, and at the 1936 Berlin Olympics he talked his way into the athletes' village to give Jesse Owens a pair. Owens won four gold medals, and sales grew to 200,000 pairs a year. Both brothers joined the Nazi party in 1933, the factory made Panzerschreck anti-tank weapons from 1943, and at least nine forced laborers worked at the company's sites.

In 1945 Adi's wife persuaded U.S. troops not to blow up the factory, and American GIs soon became customers. The brothers split in 1947, and in 1949 Adi registered Adidas while Rudolf founded the company that became Puma, dividing the town down to its bakeries and football clubs. Adi refused to pay sprinter Armin Hary, who won the 1960 Olympic 100 meters in Pumas, then switched to Adidas for the podium; Adi banned him. Adi bought the three stripes, originally midfoot support straps, from the Finnish firm Karhu Sports in 1952. The brothers never reconciled and are buried at opposite ends of the town cemetery.

• Herzogenaurach was nicknamed the town of bent necks because locals checked strangers' shoes before talking to them.
• Handymen wore Adidas to jobs at Rudolf's house so he would send them to his basement for free Pumas.
• The episode notes that Adidas does not stand for "All Day I Dream About Sports"; it joins Adi and Das.
• The brothers' 1970 World Cup pact to leave Pelé alone broke when Pelé stopped to tie his Puma boots before a quarterfinal kickoff.
• Karhu's three stripes cost the equivalent of 1,600 euros and two bottles of whiskey.

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Do Kwon and co-founder Daniel Shin started Terraform Labs in Seoul in 2018 to build TerraUSD, an algorithmic stablecoin meant to hold $1 through code alone rather than dollars in a bank. A burn and mint mechanism tied it to a second token, Luna, with arbitrage traders paid to keep the two in balance. Backers including Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy Digital and Lightspeed put in over $200 million, and the Anchor protocol drew deposits with a 19.45% yield that Terraform subsidized from its own reserves. Kwon expanded his stake to 91.7% of the company, sued the SEC over a subpoena tied to Mirror Protocol, and paid $38.15 million to sponsor the Washington Nationals.

In January 2022 Kwon set up the Luna Foundation Guard in Singapore, which built up more than 80,000 Bitcoin as a backstop. After he filed to dissolve Terraform's Korean entity and reportedly sent about $7 million to the law firm Kim & Chang, withdrawals began on May 9, 2022. The peg broke, the system minted trillions of Luna, the Bitcoin reserve was spent, and the chain was halted by May 13 after nearly $45 billion in value vanished. Kwon launched Terra 2.0, denied running a Ponzi scheme, and became the subject of an Interpol red notice before his March 2023 arrest in Montenegro. He pleaded guilty to two fraud charges in August 2025 and was sentenced to 15 years in December 2025.

• Kwon was stopped at the airport in Podgorica holding a forged Costa Rican passport, with a fake Belgian one in his bag.
• The Terra Club behind home plate at the Nationals' ballpark came from a five-year, $38.15 million deal.
• As Luna's price fell toward a penny, the protocol had to print about 100 Luna to redeem a single TerraUSD.
• Terraform Labs filed for Chapter 11 protection in the United States on January 21, 2024.
• Jump Trading paid $123 million in December 2024 to settle SEC claims, and in February 2026 the bankruptcy estate sued Jane Street over alleged insider trading.

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In 1931 Ferdinand Porsche founded an engineering consultancy in Stuttgart with Anton Piëch and Adolf Rosenberger. A German government contract produced the Volkswagen Beetle, and during World War II the firm built the Kübelwagen and the Schwimmwagen and designed the Elefant tank destroyer and the Maus super-heavy tank. Ferdinand was a member of the Nazi party and the SS, his son Ferry was an SS volunteer, Rosenberger, the Jewish co-founder, was driven out of the business and the country, and the company used thousands of forced laborers marked with a P for Poland. In December 1945 the French arrested Ferdinand for war crimes and held him 20 months without trial.

Meanwhile Ferry built the first 356 in a sawmill in Gmünd, Austria, hand-hammering aluminum over wooden bucks around Beetle parts, and the car was road certified in 1948. The firm returned to Stuttgart by 1950, and Ferdinand died after a stroke in 1951. Ferry's son F.A. Porsche designed the 911, clashing with body chief Erwin Komenda. In 1972 Ferry, influenced by Soichiro Honda, made Porsche an AG and barred the family from management; F.A. founded Porsche Design and nephew Ferdinand Piëch rose to chair the Volkswagen Group. A 2022 IPO valued Porsche at about 75 billion euros, but 2025 operating profit fell about 98%.

• The company's formal name spelled out Ferdinand Porsche's honorary engineering doctorate.
• The Schwimmwagen became the most mass-produced amphibious car in history.
• The crest, created in the early 1950s, combines the arms of Württemberg with Stuttgart's black horse.
• Peugeot's claim to three-digit names with a middle zero turned the Project 901 into the 911.
• The 2025 slump included a 3.9 billion euro EV write-down and a 26% drop in China sales, yet through Porsche SE the Porsche and Piëch families hold controlling votes in Volkswagen.

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Washington Mutual was founded in 1889 after the Great Seattle Fire as the Washington National Building Loan and Investment Association, and it issued the first home mortgage on the West Coast in 1890. For nearly a century it was a conservative mutual savings bank, "the friend of the family." After demutualizing in 1983, it went on an acquisition spree: Pioneer Savings, Great Northwest and Pacific First, then American Savings, Great Western and Home Savings in California, Bank United in Texas and New York's Dime Bancorp. Integration was chaotic, with account ownership split after the Dime deal and loans from the Fleet mortgage acquisition vanishing from its systems.

Under CEO Kerry Killinger, WaMu aimed to be the Walmart of banking and pushed the option ARM, whose minimum payment did not cover interest while the bank booked deferred interest as revenue. Brokers earned more than $10,000 per option ARM, underwriting standards were gutted, and in 2005 it bought subprime card issuer Providian. In spring 2008 it rejected JPMorgan Chase's offer of $8 a share and took $7 billion from a TPG Capital group. Killinger was fired and Alan H. Fishman lasted 17 days. After depositors pulled $16.7 billion in nine days, regulators seized the bank on September 25, 2008, its 119th anniversary, and sold its operations to JPMorgan Chase for $1.9 billion.

• With over $300 billion in assets, it was the largest bank failure in U.S. history.
• By late 2007, WaMu was closing more than 160 loan offices and laying off thousands.
• Its stock, in the $40s a year earlier, fell to about $2 by September 2008.
• The holding company filed for Chapter 11 the next day and sued the FDIC for $13 billion, calling the seizure premature.
• It emerged in 2012 as WMI Holdings, which merged into Mr. Cooper Group in 2018.

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Malcolm Bricklin, who first brought Subaru to the United States in 1968, set out in the early 1970s to build an affordable two-seat gullwing sports car focused on safety. The December 1972 prototype, the Grey Ghost, used a Chrysler Slant Six with Datsun 510 rear suspension and brakes from Opel, Datsun and Toyota. Herb Grasse, who helped George Barris turn the Lincoln Futura into the TV Batmobile, shaped the design, borrowing Carello tail lamps from his own De Tomaso Pantera. Heavy safety gear forced a move to V8 engines. New Brunswick premier Richard Hatfield backed the project with $4.5 million, and plants opened in Saint John and Minto.

To skip a paint shop, Bricklin used color-impregnated acrylic bonded to fiberglass, pressed in cheap epoxy molds that trapped heat. The first resin blistered at 150°F, UV light broke down the adhesive, and early on 60% of acrylic parts were ruined in pressing. The SV-1, for Safety Vehicle One, had a roll cage, 5 mph bumpers, no ashtray and no spare tire, and 90-pound hydraulic gullwing doors taking up to 12 seconds to open, on a single pump with no interlock. A 1975 switch from the AMC 360 to a Ford 351 forced a subframe redesign and cut horsepower to 175. The company folded in early 1976 with fewer than 3,000 cars built.

• Albert Bricklin, Malcolm's father, proposed striking each body panel with a seven-pound hammer as quality control.
• Scottsdale, Arizona police leased three SV-1s for a dollar each, and officers got trapped inside when heat killed the electrical system.
• Car and Driver compared it favorably to the Corvette, while Dan Neil put it among the 50 worst cars of all time.
• The Chairman prototype offered gold trim, a gold-plated toolkit and a matching gold jumpsuit, but never reached production.
• A 1978 Mini Bricklin go-kart with a three-horsepower engine could be ordered with a VIN matching the owner's SV-1.

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George Pullman built the town of Pullman, Illinois, outside Chicago, where his company owned every house, store, library, church, theater and utility, with brick homes, paved streets and indoor plumbing but no elected government. When the Panic of 1893 cut orders for sleeping cars, he slashed wages 20% to 30% without lowering rents or store prices, and rent was deducted before pay, leaving some workers with checks of a few cents. He fired the grievance committee, and on May 11, 1894, nearly 4,000 workers walked out, with seamstress union president Jennie Curtis among the leaders. Eugene V. Debs's new American Railway Union took up their cause.

On June 26 the ARU began refusing to handle any train carrying a Pullman car, and at its peak a quarter of a million workers in 27 states joined. The General Managers Association hired strikebreakers, many of them Black men barred from the whites-only ARU. Attorney General Richard Olney, still on a $10,000 railroad retainer, won a federal injunction on the grounds that strikers blocked the U.S. mail. Over Governor John Peter Altgeld's objections, President Grover Cleveland, who had just signed Labor Day into law, sent 12,000 troops under General Nelson Miles. About 70 people died nationwide, about 30 in Chicago.

• Samuel Gompers' American Federation of Labor and the railroad brotherhoods refused to back the boycott.
• Railroads attached Pullman cars to mail trains, so the boycott could not avoid blocking the Postal Service.
• Clarence Darrow defended Debs; conspiracy charges were dropped, but he served six months in Woodstock, Illinois for defying the injunction.
• Debs left jail a socialist, helped found the Socialist Party of America and ran for president five times.
• A federal commission called Pullman's town un-American, and in 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court forced the company to divest it.

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Through the 1880s Carnegie Steel installed open hearth furnaces and continuous production at its Homestead, Pennsylvania plant to fill U.S. Navy armor plate contracts, eroding the bargaining power of skilled workers. After an 1889 strike win, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers ran the floor under a 58-page rulebook. With the contract expiring June 30, 1892, Andrew Carnegie, who publicly defended unions, left for an estate in Scotland and had Henry Clay Frick stockpile steel. Frick demanded a 22% wage cut, locked the workers out on June 28 and 29, and ringed the plant with barbed wire, sniper towers and water cannons, a compound workers called Fort Frick.

The union took control of the town, and late on July 5 Frick sent 300 Pinkerton agents up the Monongahela on two barges. At 2:30 a.m. on July 6 the plant whistle roused thousands to the riverbank. After the tug fled, strikers attacked the stranded barges for 12 hours with a 20-pounder brass cannon, dynamite, a burning raft, a flaming railroad car and oil poured on the river. The Pinkertons surrendered at 5 p.m. and were beaten as they walked to the opera house. On July 12 Governor Robert E. Pattison sent 4,000 militia, and on July 23 anarchist Alexander Berkman shot and stabbed Frick, who survived.

• Many Pinkertons were men hired from lodging houses for about $2.50 a day who did not know their mission.
• About seven to ten Pinkertons and seven to nine strikers died, with dozens more badly injured.
• Berkman, who had no ties to the union, was sentenced to 22 years, and the union condemned the attack.
• On November 20, 1892, the workers voted 101 to 91 to return on Carnegie's terms.
• The defeat kept unions out of American steel until the late 1930s; the union's Bost Building is now a landmark.

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Insider trading is buying or selling a public company's securities on material, non-public information, and in the United States the core violation is a breach of fiduciary duty by officers, directors or owners of more than 10% of a company. The SEC uses trading surveillance, requires insiders to file a Form 4 within days of a trade, and forces violators to disgorge profits on top of fines or prison. SEC Rule 10b5-1 lets executives sell on a schedule set before they learn a secret. The misappropriation theory reaches outsiders: in a landmark 1997 Supreme Court case, lawyer James O'Hagan, whose firm represented a bidder for Pillsbury, made more than $4 million on Pillsbury options.

Tipping turns on motive. In the Dirks case, an insider who leaked to expose fraud gained no personal benefit, so the analyst who traded was not liable, while the Salman case held that tipping a relative counts as a benefit. A stranger overhearing CEOs at a diner can generally trade legally in the U.S., but not under the EU and UK market abuse model. Newer gray areas include shadow trading in related companies, dark web markets for corporate secrets, and congressional trading; the 2012 STOCK Act followed public outcry, and lawmakers who sold before the 2020 COVID crash were not charged. Milton Friedman and Henry Manne argued insider trading should be legal.

• Defenders say insider trades move prices toward their true value early and call it a victimless crime on anonymous exchanges.
• Japan did not formally outlaw insider trading until 1988.
• Some economists link strict U.S. rules to higher U.S. executive pay.
• SAC Capital portfolio manager Mathew Martoma made $276 million on one trade using clinical trial results and got nine years in prison.
• Canadian lawyer Gil Cornblum, under investigation for a 14-year conspiracy, took his own life the day before an alleged co-conspirator was to plead guilty.

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Newly independent Latvia introduced the lats on August 3, 1922, replacing the Latvian ruble at 50 rubles per lats and dividing it into 100 santimi. It was tied to the gold standard and from 1936 pegged to the British pound at about 25.2 lats per pound, then floated in 1939 as sterling fell. The one, two and five lats coins were struck in 83.5% silver, and the five lats coin introduced around Christmas 1929 showed a Latvian maiden at the helm of a sailboat. After the Soviet occupation in the summer of 1940, the Bank of Latvia was dissolved and the ruble was forced on shops at par, though it was worth about a third of a lats.

On March 25, 1941, at 1:05 p.m., the lats was withdrawn without warning, deposits over 1,000 lats were nationalized, and gold and currency reserves had already gone to Moscow. Latvians hid the silver five lats coin as a symbol of independence. In March 1993 a second lats replaced the transitional ruble at 200 to 1, and it became the fourth most valuable currency unit in the world and, after Malta adopted the euro in 2008, the most valuable in Europe. Its notes showed oak trees, the Daugava River and folklorist Krišjānis Barons. Latvia adopted the euro on January 1, 2014, at about 0.702804 lats per euro.

• The 500 lats note, worth over 700 euros, was the world's third most valuable banknote in circulation.
• Soviet authorities had to impose buyer limits to slow the drain of Latvian goods bought with par-valued rubles.
• The copper-nickel two lats coin of 1992 was counterfeited so often that a bi-metallic version replaced it from 1999.
• The lats was one of only 99 entries in the official Latvian culture canon.
• Old lats notes can still be exchanged for euros at the Bank of Latvia in Riga at the fixed rate.