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In 1900 William C. Durant ran the largest US maker of horse-drawn vehicles and openly disliked automobiles, but after buying into Buick around 1904 he formed General Motors in 1908 as a holding company and quickly added Oldsmobile, Cadillac and Oakland. In 1909 he nearly bought Ford for $8 million, but banks refused the $2 million down payment, and by 1910 the bankers had ousted him. He came back through Chevrolet, founded with racer Louis Chevrolet in 1911, retook control in 1917 and was pushed out for good in 1920 by Pierre S. du Pont. Alfred P. Sloan then built a price ladder from Chevrolet to Cadillac and introduced the annual model change.

GM produced Charles Kettering's 1911 electric starter and Thomas Midgley Jr.'s tetraethyl lead and CFCs; the 1936 to 1937 Flint sit-down strike won recognition for the UAW; and GM's German unit Opel supplied the Wehrmacht while its US plants armed the Allies. After the moon buggy and the first passenger airbag came the troubled Cadillac V8-6-4, a $750 million buyout of Ross Perot in 1986, the loss of the top-automaker title to Toyota in 2008, and a 2009 Chapter 11 filing with a government stake sold off by 2014. Under Mary Barra, GM set a goal of ending combustion engines by 2035, then scaled back some EV targets in 2025.

• GM patented tetraethyl lead rather than use ethanol, which also stopped engine knock but could not be patented.
• Flint strikers won a 5% raise and the right to talk to each other in the lunchroom.
• After World War II, GM received $32 million in tax write-offs and compensation for Opel plants destroyed by Allied bombing.
• GM built the 1966 Electrovan hydrogen fuel cell vehicle and, with Boeing, the 1971 lunar roving vehicle.
• Post-bankruptcy GM dropped Hummer, Saturn, Saab and Pontiac, signed an $18.6 billion cathode deal with LG Chem and bought the self-driving startup Cruise.

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In 1975 in A Coruña, Spain, Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera planned to call their shop Zorba, after the 1964 film, until they learned a bar two blocks away already used the name; they rearranged the sign letters with a spare A and became Zara. Starting with low-priced lookalikes of high fashion, the company borrowed just-in-time methods from carmakers around 1990 and cut design-to-shelf time from the industry's six months to as little as one week. It produces about 12,000 items from 40,000 designs a year, routes everything through a central distribution center in Spain handling over 450 million items annually, and makes about half its merchandise, the trendiest pieces, in Galicia, northern Portugal and Turkey.

Store managers send daily reports on what customers buy, try on and request, slow sellers are pulled within a week, and European shoppers visit Zara 17 times a year versus three for a typical store, so the company skips advertising and spends on prime real estate. The pace has brought friction: a Brazilian factory making Zara clothing was closed in 2011 over labor conditions, unpaid Bravo Textile workers in Istanbul hid notes in garments in 2017, about 1,000 shop assistants struck on Black Friday 2022 and won a 322 euro monthly raise, and in 2024 Zara agreed to a $1.25 million New York overtime settlement. Nine days after Greenpeace's 2012 Toxic Threads report, it pledged to end hazardous chemical releases by 2020.

• Zara generated 26.2 billion euros in 2023 across more than 2,000 stores in about 96 countries.
• Finnish authorities investigated four stores in 2023 after 95% of surveyed staff at one called the workload unbearable.
• Artist Tuesday Bassen showed Zara had copied her pins and patches in 2016, and Inditex suspended the items after public backlash.
• A 2014 striped toddler shirt with a yellow six-pointed star was pulled within hours.
• A 2023 campaign called The Jacket was withdrawn after 50 complaints to the UK Advertising Standards Authority.

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Yves Saint Laurent founded his house in 1962 with his partner in life and business, Pierre Bergé, and in 1963 commissioned the designer Cassandre to create the interlocking YSL monogram. Drawing on Left Bank counterculture, he brought safari jackets, thigh-high boots and leather trousers into couture, and his 1965 Mondrian dresses used near-invisible seams in heavy wool jersey to build the painting's grid into the garment. In 1966 he introduced Le Smoking, a tuxedo cut for women that saw wearers turned away from restaurants, and launched Saint Laurent Rive Gauche, becoming the first major couturier to popularize ready-to-wear.

Licensing, cosmetics and fragrances such as Opium funded rapid expansion, and his broad-shouldered 1978 look set up 1980s power dressing, but overextension left the house struggling by the early 1990s. Sanofi bought it in 1993 and Kering in 1999; Kering handed ready-to-wear to Alber Elbaz and then Tom Ford, closed haute couture in 2002, and Saint Laurent died of brain cancer in 2008. Hedi Slimane moved the design studio to Los Angeles in 2012 and dropped Yves from the ready-to-wear name, and during the pandemic Anthony Vaccarello sold discounted bags in bulk to wholesalers with authentication tags removed.

• Muses including Betty Catroux, Loulou de la Falaise and Catherine Deneuve embodied the brand's image.
• Paris boutique Colette sold Ain't Laurent Without Yves parody shirts, and the house canceled its wholesale order.
• Under Stefano Pilati, stores in San Francisco, Chicago's Oak Street and on Madison Avenue closed.
• Investigators found Kering routed about 550 million euros in profits through a Swiss subsidiary from 2009 to 2017, evading roughly 180 million euros in French taxes.
• Saint Laurent Productions funds films by directors including Pedro Almodóvar and David Cronenberg.

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Yahoo began in 1994 as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web, a human-edited directory built by Stanford electrical engineering graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. The founders linked the name to the Yahoos of Gulliver's Travels, though it also stood for Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle. After an April 1996 IPO, Yahoo bought RocketMail, GeoCities for $3.6 billion and Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion to build a portal, and its stock peaked near $119 in January 2000 before falling to about $8 in 2001. In 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell Google's algorithm for $1 million and Yahoo passed; in 2002 CEO Terry Semel offered $3 billion, Google asked for $5 billion, and Yahoo walked away again.

In 2008 Yahoo's board rejected a Microsoft offer raised to $47 billion, and Microsoft went on to build Bing. A run of chief executives followed: Carol Bartz was fired by phone in 2011, Scott Thompson lasted 130 days, and Marissa Mayer bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion in 2013 while facing lawsuits over her performance rating system, most claims of which a magistrate judge dismissed. Yahoo later confirmed that all 3 billion user accounts had been compromised in an August 2013 theft that relied on forged web cookies. Verizon agreed in 2016 to buy the core business for $4.83 billion, cut the price by $350 million after the breach disclosures, and closed the deal in June 2017.

• After licensing Google's technology from 2000, Yahoo bought Inktomi for $280 million to build its own search.
• In 2005 journalist Shi Tao was sentenced to 10 years in prison after Yahoo provided his email data to Chinese authorities.
• Scott Thompson cut about 2,000 jobs and left with at least $7.3 million after roughly four months.
• Yahoo closed GeoCities in 2009, deleting millions of user-built web pages.
• The Alibaba and Yahoo Japan stakes became Altaba, while the media unit, Oath, was 90% sold to Apollo Global Management in 2021.

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The Studebaker story begins in 1736, when Peter Studebaker, a master of the German cutlers' guild from Solingen, arrived in Philadelphia and by 1740 built a home and wagon works on a Maryland tract he called Baker's Lookout, with his own timber, iron ore and water power. In 1852 his great-grandsons Henry and Clement opened a blacksmith business in South Bend, Indiana, while their brother John M. Studebaker built reinforced wheelbarrows for miners in Placerville, California, during the Gold Rush and saved $8,000. In 1858 John returned and used that money to buy out Henry, a devout Dunker Brethren pacifist who refused to build wagons for the Army, freeing the brothers to supply the Union with standardized wagons.

Incorporated in 1868, the company rebuilt in brick after an 1874 fire, ran the world's largest vehicle works on 20 acres and sold carriages to President Harrison's White House. Its first cars in 1902 were electric; partner-built gasoline cars proved unreliable, and the company spent about a million dollars sending mechanics by train to fix them. During the Depression president Albert Erskine paid out large dividends, the company entered receivership in 1933, and Erskine took his own life that year. Studebaker built US6 trucks and B-17 engines in World War II, merged with Packard in 1954 and found brief success with the 1959 Lark, then closed South Bend in 1963 and built its last car in Hamilton, Ontario, on March 17, 1966.

• Peter Studebaker built the Broadfording Wagon Road in 1747 to carry the heavy traffic of his goods.
• An 1889 order from President Harrison covered a full set of Studebaker carriages and harnesses for the White House.
• In 1937 the company planted 5,000 pine trees at its Indiana proving ground to spell Studebaker from the sky, still visible in satellite images.
• Postwar designs by Virgil Exner and Raymond Loewy borrowed from the Lockheed P-38, prompting jokes that you could not tell if a Studebaker was coming or going.
• Soviet trucks were based on Studebaker's wartime designs supplied through Lend-Lease.

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In 1914 Germany suspended the gold standard and funded World War I by borrowing, expecting to annex territory and make the losers pay as it had after the Franco-Prussian War. France, by contrast, introduced an income tax. Germany lost, carrying 156 billion marks of domestic debt in 1918, while the mark slid from 4.2 to 7.9 to the dollar. The May 1921 London Schedule of Payments set reparations at 132 billion gold marks, though only about 50 billion in A and B bonds was expected to be paid. From August 1921 the Reichsbank under Rudolf Havenstein bought foreign currency with newly printed marks at almost any price.

Historians cite chancellery records suggesting leaders delayed tax reform to show reparations were impossible, while inflation erased the state's own war debt. When Germany missed a coal delivery in early 1923, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr, and the government printed money to pay striking workers. In November 1923 Hans Luther and Hjalmar Schacht introduced the Rentenmark, backed by mortgages on German land, removed 12 zeros and barred the central bank from discounting treasury bills. The 1925 revaluation law restored private mortgages at 25% and war bonds at 2.5%.

• Bread in Berlin rose from 160 marks to 200 billion marks in less than a year.
• Workers were paid twice a day, and families collected cash at factory gates at lunchtime to spend at once.
• Cigarettes became a widely accepted medium of exchange.
• Karl Helfferich's rye-backed Roggenmark was rejected because crop prices were too volatile.
• Revaluation lawsuits pushed the German Supreme Court to establish judicial review.

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After the French defeated the Royal Navy at Beachy Head in 1690, King William III needed about £1.5 million, but lending to monarchs was risky. Scottish trader William Paterson proposed a public fund, and William Phips's treasure from a sunken Spanish galleon set off a craze for joint stock investing. The Tonnage Act of 1694 incorporated the Bank of England, offering 8% interest and raising £1.2 million in 12 days from 1,268 subscribers, 12% of them women, with William and Mary each investing the £10,000 maximum. The bank moved to Threadneedle Street in 1734, and James Gillray's 1797 cartoon named it the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

Nathan Mayer Rothschild shipped in gold to end the Panic of 1825, and the Bank Charter Act of 1844 gave the bank sole note-issuing rights backed by gold. In April 1913 suffragettes left a bomb in a milk churn outside; it was defused. In World War II staff worked in the vaults and printing moved to Hampshire. The Labour government nationalized the bank in 1946, and in 1997 Gordon Brown gave it operational independence with a 2% inflation target.

• Nazi Germany's Operation Bernhard forgeries were estimated at over 10% of the face value of pound notes in circulation.
• If inflation misses the 2% target, the governor must write an open letter to the chancellor.
• Through the Prudential Regulation Authority, the bank stress-tests banks, credit unions and insurers.
• The bank settles around £500 billion in payments between banks every day through its RTGS system.
• An unredeemed 3% Treasury stock from the 1946 buyout still pays dividends to shareholders the bank cannot name.

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Wachovia came from two North Carolina banks. The original Wachovia started in Winston-Salem in 1879 alongside R.J. Reynolds Tobacco, and First Union began in 1908 as Union National Bank, a desk in a Charlotte hotel lobby run by H.M. Victor. In 2001 First Union agreed to buy Wachovia, beat a hostile bid from Atlanta's SunTrust, then took the Wachovia name and ticker. A deliberately slow two-year systems integration helped it rank first in customer satisfaction in the University of Michigan index. In May 2006 it bought Golden West Financial, owner of World Savings Bank, for $25.5 billion, inheriting its pick-a-pay option adjustable rate mortgages, which allowed negative amortization.

Over 70% of those loans sat in California, Florida and Arizona. After an $8.9 billion second-quarter loss in 2008, CEO Ken Thompson was fired and Robert K. Steele brought in. When Washington Mutual was seized on September 26, 2008, depositors pulled $5 billion from Wachovia in one day. The FDIC's Sheila Bair and the New York Fed's Tim Geithner clashed, and Wachovia was declared systemically important. Citigroup agreed to buy its banking operations for about $1 a share with FDIC loss protection, but on October 3 Wells Fargo agreed to buy the whole bank without assistance.

• Former officials admitted the Golden West deal was negotiated in days with no time to vet the loans.
• Under the Citigroup deal, the FDIC would have absorbed loan losses beyond $42 billion.
• Citigroup sued for $60 billion and settled for $100 million.
• Wachovia paid up to $144 million in 2008 over processing more than $140 million in unsigned telemarketer checks despite warnings.
• In 2010 it was fined $160 million under the Bank Secrecy Act after cartels laundered at least $110 million through Mexican casas de cambio.

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Before World War I, W.O. Bentley and his brother Horace sold French DFP cars in Cricklewood, North London. In 1913 an aluminum paperweight gave W.O. the idea for aluminum pistons, lighter than cast iron, and during the war his pistons went into engines of the Sopwith Camel. Convinced engines must never fail, he founded Bentley Motors in January 1919, the same day the Paris Peace Conference opened, and built a 3-liter engine with an overhead camshaft. His cars ran the 1922 Indianapolis 500, finishing 13th, then the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy, and won the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 1924.

By 1926 the company was broke, and diamond and gold heir Woolf Barnato took control, ushering in the Bentley Boys era. Sir Henry "Tim" Birkin built supercharged Blower Bentleys over W.O.'s objection; they were fast but never won a major race. After the 1929 crash, W.O.'s near-silent 8-liter car alarmed Rolls-Royce. When Bentley entered receivership in 1931, the British Central Equitable Trust outbid Napier with £125,000 and turned out to be a front for Rolls-Royce, which took on W.O. under contract.

• Barnato won a £100 bet by driving from a bar in Cannes to his London club before the Blue Train reached Calais.
• W.O. said supercharging his engine would "pervert its design and corrupt its performance."
• The Blower Bentley later became James Bond's car in Ian Fleming's novels.
• W.O. left Rolls-Royce when his contract ended in 1935 and joined Lagonda.
• He later called the 1933 3.5-liter model built under Rolls-Royce the finest car to carry his name.

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Volkswagen pushed "clean diesel" cars in the U.S., where strict limits target nitrogen oxides, and diesel engines produce about 20 times the NOx of comparable gasoline engines. Around 2005 VW planned to license Mercedes-Benz's BlueTec urea system, but its tank would not fit compact cars like the Jetta and Golf, and VW dropped the deal in 2007 for a cheaper lean NOx trap. Running that trap often enough to pass U.S. rules hurt fuel economy and performance. Engineers instead programmed the EA189 engine's control unit to detect a lab test, using cues like a steering wheel that never turns, and switch emissions controls on only then.

On the road the cars emitted up to 40 times the legal NOx limit. About 11 million vehicles carried the code, including about 500,000 U.S. cars from 2009 to 2015. In 2013 the International Council on Clean Transportation hired West Virginia University researchers to road-test VWs with portable Horiba equipment, expecting a success story, and found the excess. VW blamed calibration and issued a recall patch until the EPA threatened to withhold 2016 certification. VW admitted the device on September 3, 2015, and the EPA announced the violation on September 18.

• VW stock fell 20% on the first trading day after the announcement and another 17% the next day.
• CEO Martin Winterkorn resigned within days, and several executives were later indicted on fraud and conspiracy charges.
• By 2020 the direct cost to Volkswagen exceeded $33 billion.
• One study tied the excess emissions to 59 premature U.S. deaths; another estimated up to 16,000 in Europe.
• Later testing implicated Jeep, Ram, Mercedes-Benz, Renault and Peugeot, and regulators adopted real driving emissions tests.