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In 1945 former JCPenney employee Sam Walton bought a Ben Franklin variety store franchise from the Butler Brothers at a high price with steep rent. He cut out regional middlemen, bought direct from manufacturers and passed the savings to customers, and sales grew from $105,000 in the first year to $250,000 by year five. Then the landlord refused to renew the lease and kept the store, forcing Walton to restart in Bentonville, Arkansas, with Walton's Five and Dime. He studied rivals closely, from Ann and Hope in New England to Sol Price's FedMart in California.

On July 2, 1962, Sam and his brother Bud opened the first Wal-Mart Discount City in Rogers, Arkansas, a name Walton said he chose because he liked FedMart. Within five years there were 18 stores with $9 million in sales. The company incorporated in 1969, went public in 1970 and built a hub and spoke network with cross-docking. In 1987 it completed a $24 million private satellite network, then the largest in the world, linking every store to Bentonville. Walton launched Sam's Club in 1983 and handed the CEO role to David Glass in 1988.

• New stores opened only within a day's drive of a distribution center so trucks could make the round trip in one shift.
• By 1984 Walton was sourcing between 6 and 40 percent of products from China.
• A 2001 McKinsey study tied much of the late 1990s U.S. retail productivity jump to Walton's supply chain methods.
• In 2005 the satellite and truck network delivered relief to Hurricane Katrina victims before FEMA mobilized.
• Kenneth Stone's research found some small towns lost up to half their local retail trade within a decade of a supercenter opening.

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In the summer of 1998, Russia's ruble lost two thirds of its value in less than a month. The groundwork was years of deficits: the first Chechen War cost close to $30 million a day in early 1995 and an estimated $5.5 billion by 1996, pushing the budget deficit to nearly 10 percent of GDP. The central bank held the ruble in a band of 5.3 to 7.1 per dollar, spending reserves to defend it. Then the 1997 Asian financial crisis drove investors out of emerging markets, and prices for crude oil and non-ferrous metals fell.

In March 1998 Boris Yeltsin fired Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin and the entire cabinet and installed 35-year-old energy minister Sergei Kiriyenko. GKO rates hit 150 percent, and a $22.6 billion IMF and World Bank package in July failed to hold. On August 17 the government devalued the ruble, defaulted on domestic debt and froze foreign debt payments for 90 days. By September the rate reached 21 rubles per dollar and inflation hit 84 percent. Yevgeny Primakov became prime minister, and rising oil prices, import substitution and a barter economy fed a fast recovery.

• By May 1998 unpaid wages reached $12.5 billion, and striking coal miners blocked the Trans-Siberian Railway.
• About $5 billion of the IMF and World Bank loans was allegedly stolen on arrival.
• The central bank spent $27 billion defending the ruble between October 1997 and August 1998.
• Bankers Trust took such heavy losses on Russian bonds that it was acquired by Deutsche Bank for $10 billion.
• Ukraine and Moldova defaulted in the aftermath, and Romania privatized its first state bank.

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Private equity funds buy private companies or take public ones private, restructure them and sell within about four to seven years. General partners raise money from limited partners such as pension funds, endowments and insurers, then pull four levers: revenue growth, margin expansion, debt paydown and a higher valuation multiple. A leveraged buyout funds most of a purchase with debt placed on the target company, and the interest is tax deductible; debt made up about 70 percent of a typical buyout before 2005 and closer to 50 percent today. The industry traces to 1946, when Georges Doriot founded the American Research and Development Corporation to back businesses run by returning World War II soldiers.

ARDC's $70,000 stake in Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957 was worth over $355 million by 1968. The 1980s brought raiders such as Carl Icahn, Michael Milken's junk bonds at Drexel Burnham Lambert and KKR's $31.1 billion RJR Nabisco buyout, then Drexel's 1990 bankruptcy. Sarbanes-Oxley compliance costs helped spark the 2005 to 2007 mega buyouts of Toys R Us and Hertz, and today companies stay private longer. The episode weighs the carried interest tax debate, dividend recapitalizations, health care outcomes and Oren Cass's critique of wealth capture.

• Private equity spent 63 billion pounds buying British businesses in 2024, including the Royal Mail's parent and Darktrace.
• Goldman Sachs research found the London Stock Exchange shrank at its fastest pace in over a decade.
• Moody's Ratings found companies backed by large private equity firms were twice as likely to default.
• A University of Chicago study linked private equity ownership of nursing homes to a 10 percent rise in short-term Medicare patient mortality.
• A 2024 study of 51 acquired hospitals found a 25 percent increase in hospital-acquired conditions.

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A loan shark works outside the law; a predatory lender works through it. A 2006 FDIC audit report defined predatory lending as imposing unfair, deceptive or fraudulent terms during loan origination, usually on loans secured by a house or car. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency catalogued the tactics: loan flipping through repeated refinancing, packing loans with fees and single premium credit insurance, balloon payments, and negative amortization, where a payment too small to cover interest makes the balance grow. In 2004, 69 percent of borrowers used some form of subprime loan, with fees often above 5 percent versus about 1 percent for prime loans.

Lenders targeted the elderly, minorities, the poor and the less educated, and research by Anita F. Hill pointed to first-time female buyers. Most courts treat lending under caveat emptor rather than as a fiduciary relationship. Economist Tyler Cowen argued predatory borrowing was a larger problem: one study found up to 70 percent of early payment defaults involved fraudulent misrepresentations, often coached by brokers chasing yield spread premiums on stated income loans. Securitization then separated borrowers from the owners of their notes, and state anti-predatory laws produced mixed, sometimes paradoxical results.

• Lenders referred internally to certain heavily minority neighborhoods as Never Never Land.
• Even controlling for income, minority buyers were more likely to be steered to subprime lenders.
• The New York attorney general found appraisal firm eAppraiseIt bowed to pressure from Washington Mutual loan officers, leading to a $7.8 million settlement.
• An Illinois rule requiring HUD-certified counseling led some borrowers to pick safer loans simply to avoid the sessions.
• When the original promissory note cannot be found, courts often accept a sworn statement of ownership and let foreclosure proceed.

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Pizza Hut began in 1958 in Wichita, Kansas, when Wichita State students Dan and Frank Carney borrowed $600 from their mother to open a pizzeria. The sign they inherited had room for only eight letters, so with five taken by PIZZA, the second word had to fit in three. They began franchising within a year, recruiting fellow students, among them future NFL coach Bill Parcells, and passed 100 locations in under a decade. The red roof design arrived in 1969, credited by some to Chicago architect George Lindstrom and by others to Wichita architect Richard D. Burke, said to have sketched it for $100 per store.

In August 1994 the chain and the Santa Cruz Operation launched PizzaNet, routing online orders from California to a server in Kansas and back to a local kitchen. It launched Stuffed Crust in March 1995, filmed a 1998 commercial in Red Square starring Mikhail Gorbachev, and in 2001 sent a vacuum-sealed pizza to cosmonaut Yuri Usachev on the International Space Station. Domino's passed it in total sales by 2018, and after the collapse of its largest franchisee, NPC International, Yum Brands moved toward a 2026 split sale of the U.S. business, while Yum China ran more than 4,000 outlets by the end of 2025.

• The 2024 documentary Slice of Life follows former Pizza Hut buildings converted into pharmacies, tax offices and other businesses.
• Starting in 2019, some locations were converted back into a retro classic format.
• The Book It program, launched in 1985, rewarded young readers with a free personal pan pizza and drew criticism from the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood.
• The brand appeared in Back to the Future Part II and sponsored the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles live musical tour.
• In Beijing from 1990, Pizza Hut was presented as sit-down dining with knives, forks and a localized menu.

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Petrodollar recycling is the process by which oil exporters such as OPEC members, Russia and Norway earn more U.S. dollars than their own economies can absorb and send the surplus back into the world. After the 1973 oil crisis, exporters built a collective surplus of roughly $450 billion between 1974 and 1981. The IMF encouraged them to recycle it into U.S. Treasuries and Western banks, which fueled the offshore eurodollar market and a wave of loans to Brazil, Argentina and Turkey. In 1977 Turkey was so short of foreign exchange that government buildings went unheated, and Suleyman Demirel said the country was in need of 70 cents.

When interest rates spiked in the early 1980s, dozens of developing states defaulted, producing a lost decade across Latin America. Between 2005 and 2014 OPEC revenue hit about $1 trillion a year, and sovereign wealth funds, holding around $7 trillion globally by 2014, bought into Daimler, the Chrysler Building, Chelsea Football Club and Cezanne's The Card Players. The episode also covers Soviet grain purchases funded by oil, checkbook diplomacy, proxy funding, and William R. Clark's theory of petrodollar warfare along with the economic arguments against it.

• The Kuwait Investment Authority became the largest, most consistent shareholder in Daimler, parent of Mercedes-Benz.
• Abu Dhabi's investment council bought a 90 percent stake in New York's Chrysler Building.
• Emirates airline bought $500 million worth of French wine to serve on its flights.
• Venezuela sent subsidized oil to Cuba in exchange for tens of thousands of workers, including an estimated 30,000 medical professionals.
• A 2009 interception of a ship carrying over 300 tons of weapons is cited as evidence of Iran arming proxy groups.

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Peter Lynch was born in 1944 in Newton, Massachusetts, outside Boston. His father died of brain cancer when he was 10, and as a teenager he caddied at the Brae Burn Country Club, where one regular was D. George Sullivan, president of Fidelity Investments. As a Boston College sophomore studying history and philosophy, he bought Flying Tiger Airlines at $7 a share and watched it reach $80, paying for his education. At Wharton he clashed with the efficient market and random walk theories, then joined Fidelity as an intern in 1966 and full time in 1969 after two years in the Army.

In 1977 Lynch took over the Magellan Fund with about $18 million in assets; by 1990 it held $14 billion, with an average annual return of 29.2 percent. He held hundreds and sometimes over a thousand stocks, using small positions to stay in contact with management teams. His books, One Up on Wall Street and Beating the Street, promoted local knowledge backed by hard financial analysis under the growth at a reasonable price approach. After stepping down he applied the same thinking to philanthropy, backing First Night, City Year, Teach for America and Partners in Health.

• Fidelity colleague Joel Tillinghast described Lynch's tiny positions as a way to receive company mailings and attend shareholder meetings.
• Lynch invested in Dunkin' Donuts after noticing, as a Boston customer, its good coffee and constantly packed stores.
• His rule of thumb: a company growing earnings 20 percent a year should carry a P/E ratio below 20, and too much debt was a deal breaker.
• He borrowed the term ten-bagger from baseball for a stock that returns ten times its purchase price.
• A $10 million gift to Boston College established the Lynch School of Education and Human Development, and the Lynch Foundation holds over $125 million.

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In 2017 the Paradise Papers leaked 13.4 million confidential documents, 1.4 terabytes of data, covering more than 120,000 people and companies. Most came from Appleby, an offshore law firm with roots in Bermuda, along with corporate service providers and business registries in 19 tax jurisdictions. The German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung obtained the files and shared them with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, whose more than 380 reporters mapped connections with graph database tools such as Neo4j and Linkurious. Appleby called it a cyberattack, not a leak, and said its work was legal. Most of what the files showed was lawful tax avoidance rather than evasion.

The documents showed Appleby helping Apple move two subsidiaries to Jersey, which has a zero percent corporate tax rate, after a 2013 U.S. Senate probe. Glencore's Australian arm ran about $25 billion in cross-currency swaps, and in 2009 Glencore made a $45 million loan to Dan Gertler tied to negotiations over Congo's Katanga copper mine. The files also covered Bono, Shakira, Lewis Hamilton's private jet, the Queen's Duchy of Lancaster, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and Russian state money that flowed into Facebook and Twitter through Yuri Milner's DST Global. Appleby later sued the BBC and the Guardian.

• Lewis Hamilton's $27 million jet, registered via the Isle of Man, produced a $5.2 million VAT refund.
• The Duchy of Lancaster held offshore investments that included a stake in the rent-to-own retailer BrightHouse.
• Ross's Navigator Holdings had ties to sanctioned Russian oligarchs and Vladimir Putin's former son-in-law.
• Ross shorted Navigator stock the day before his response became public, and the shares fell 4 percent.
• Glencore took the Australian Taxation Office to the High Court to block use of the papers and lost.

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Pan American Airways began in 1927 as a geopolitical block. U.S. Army Air Corps officers including Henry Arnold and Carl Spaatz feared a German-backed Colombian airline seeking landing rights in the Panama Canal Zone and set up a shell company to win the Key West to Havana airmail contract. Juan Trippe, backed by Vanderbilt and Harriman money, already held landing rights in Havana, and days before the deadline the two groups merged with Trippe in control. Guaranteed mail payments funded expansion, and Washington made Pan Am its chosen instrument abroad. In 1935 the chartered ship North Haven carried crews to Midway and Wake Island to blast coral, build radio stations and hotels for the flying boats.

Pan Am flew the first transpacific mail in 1935 and transatlantic passengers by 1939, and in January 1942 the Pacific Clipper flew home westward after Pearl Harbor, completing the first circumnavigation by a commercial airliner. It launched the Boeing 707 in 1958 and pushed Boeing to build the 747, which entered service in 1970. Then the 1973 oil crisis, 1978 deregulation, a costly purchase of National Airlines and the 1988 Lockerbie bombing drained it. Pan Am ceased operations on December 4, 1991.

• Pan Am's clippers took their name from fast sailing ships, and pilots wore naval style uniforms to borrow the trust of ocean liners.
• IBM built the PANAMAC computerized reservation system for Pan Am, filling an entire floor.
• The Pan Am Building over Grand Central Terminal was briefly the largest commercial office building in the world.
• With almost no domestic routes, Pan Am had no feeder network once deregulation let rivals fly overseas.
• To survive the 1980s it sold its Manhattan headquarters, its hotel chain and its Pacific division to United Airlines.

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Palm was founded in 1992 in Sunnyvale, California, by Jeff Hawkins, joined by Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan. Its first job, software for the Zoomer handheld, flopped, so Palm survived by selling sync software for Hewlett-Packard devices and its Graffiti handwriting recognition to Apple for the Newton. After U.S. Robotics bought it in 1995 and 3Com acquired U.S. Robotics in 1997, Palm released the Palm Pilot, a companion organizer that synced with a PC. The founders left in 1998 to start Handspring, and 3Com spun Palm out in March 2000, when its stock hit $95.06 on day one before falling to $6.50 by June 2001.

Palm then split off its software as PalmSource, merged its hardware arm with Handspring as palmOne, paid $30 million to buy back its own name, and later paid $44 million to license Palm OS code from Access. In January 2009 it unveiled webOS and the Palm Pre, whose card interface brought true multitasking to smartphones, but launched it only on Sprint. HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion in 2010, then CEO Léo Apotheker killed webOS hardware on August 18, 2011, and TouchPads sold out at $99.

• Palm lost 90 percent of its market value in just over a year after its IPO.
• Palm briefly sold the Treo 700w running Windows Mobile through a partnership with Microsoft and Verizon.
• Elevation Partners bought a 25 percent stake for $325 million in 2007.
• HP sold the webOS code and patents to LG in February 2013, which used them to run smart TVs.
• TCL acquired the Palm trademark and revived the name in 2018 for a tiny Android companion phone backed by Steph Curry.