pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Enzo Ferrari was an Alfa Romeo salesman and racing driver when he founded Scuderia Ferrari in 1929, using wealthy gentlemen drivers to fund a stable that hired professionals such as Antonio Ascari, Giuseppe Campari and Tazio Nuvolari. When Alfa Romeo withdrew its works team in 1933, Scuderia Ferrari raced its cars as an unofficial proxy, winning 144 of 225 races between 1929 and 1937. Alfa absorbed the team back into Milan in 1937, and Ferrari left in 1939 with a settlement and a four-year non-compete barring his name from racing or cars. Under Auto Avio Costruzioni he built one car, the 815, then made hydraulic grinding machines and aircraft parts during the war, moving to Maranello, where the factory was bombed in 1944 and 1945.

In 1947 the first car bearing his name, the V12-powered 125 S, left Maranello. The prancing horse came from Paolina Baracca, mother of World War I ace Francesco Baracca, whom Ferrari met after winning at Ravenna in 1923; he placed it on Modena's canary yellow, while red was Italy's mandated racing color. In 1963 Ford came close to buying the company, but Ferrari walked out over a clause requiring Detroit approval for racing spending, and Henry Ford II answered with the GT40, which ended Ferrari's six-year Le Mans streak in 1966. In 1969 Fiat bought 50 percent and took over road cars while Ferrari kept full control of racing. He resisted mid-engine cars before the 1967 Dino 206 GT, and the 1987 F40 was the last car he approved before his death in 1988.

• Ferrari was known for pitting his own drivers against each other.
• He argued the engine belonged in front because the horse pulls the cart.
• The company reorganized as a public entity in 1960.
• His son Piero still holds the 10 percent personal stake Ferrari retained.
• Brand Finance later named Ferrari the world's strongest brand.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

The Cavalieri Ducati brothers founded Ducati in Bologna in July 1926 to make radio components. By 1944 the factory was badly damaged, and with SIATA the company introduced the Cucciolo, or puppy, a 48cc clip-on engine for ordinary bicycles named for its yapping exhaust, which managed close to 200 miles per gallon and sold over 200,000 units. By 1950 Ducati was building complete motorcycles such as the 55M and 65TL. At the 1952 Milan Show its four-stroke Cruiser scooter was called the most interesting machine on display, yet it lasted only two years and a few thousand sales.

Chief designer Fabio Taglioni, who used a prancing horse emblem honoring World War I pilot Francesco Baracca, shaped the brand's 90-degree L-twin engine and its desmodromic valves, which close mechanically rather than with springs so the engine can rev higher without valve float. Design swung between misses and hits: Giorgetto Giugiaro's angular 1975 860 GT handled poorly at speed and was reworked a year later, Massimo Tamburini's fully enclosed Paso split opinion, and his 1994 916 introduced a single-sided swingarm and under-seat exhausts. Miguel Galluzzi's naked 1993 Monster exposed the trellis frame and engine and now accounts for almost half of worldwide sales.

• The rattling dry clutch, used for decades for racing reasons, has largely been replaced by wet clutches.
• Ducati has historically spent up to 10 percent of revenue on racing.
• It returned to Grand Prix racing in 2003 after a 30-year absence, and Casey Stoner won the 2007 title.
• Francesco Bagnaia won the MotoGP championship in 2022.
• There are more than 400 official owners clubs, and Ducati has co-branded luggage with Tumi.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Detroit's population fell from about 1.8 million in 1950 to roughly 700,000 in 2013, while the city still spanned 139 square miles. More than two-thirds of its businesses closed between 1972 and 2015, revenue dropped over 20 percent from 2008 levels, and in 2011, 47 percent of property owners did not pay property taxes. Despite cutting operating costs 38 percent, the city had borrowed $1.6 billion through certificates of participation for pensions, tied to interest rate swaps whose termination penalties hit after 2008. In March 2013 Governor Rick Snyder appointed Kevin Orr as emergency manager, who found a $162 million cash shortfall, and the city filed the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history, with an estimated $18 to $20 billion in debt.

The next day state judge Rosemarie Aquilina ruled the filing unconstitutional under the Michigan Constitution's pension protections, but federal bankruptcy judge Steven Rhodes stayed state proceedings and in December 2013 ruled the city eligible, holding that pensions could be cut as contracts. With creditors eyeing the Detroit Institute of Arts' 66,000 works, mediator Judge Gerald Rosen assembled the Grand Bargain: foundations including Ford, Kresge, Knight and Mott, the state and the museum committed $816 million over 20 years, spun the DIA off as an independent nonprofit and directed the money to pensions. General retiree cuts fell to 4.5 percent. Rhodes approved the plan in November 2014, and Detroit exited bankruptcy in December 2014, 17 months after filing.

• Only about 60 municipal bankruptcies have been filed since 1950.
• The previous record holder, Jefferson County, Alabama, had debt of around $4 billion.
• Orr first offered some creditors settlements as low as 10 percent of what they were owed.
• Creditors absorbed about $7 billion in losses, recovering 14 to 75 cents on the dollar.
• During COVID-19, lost casino revenue opened a new deficit, and Mayor Mike Duggan cut blight removal funding.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Tyco was founded in 1960 by Arthur J. Rosenberg as a research and materials firm. After Dennis Kozlowski became CEO in 1992, it bought roughly 3,000 companies over a decade, including electronics maker AMP and Raychem in 1999 and security company ADT in 1997, a reverse takeover that moved Tyco's incorporation to Bermuda. By the end of fiscal 2000 Tyco reported a $141 billion book value alongside more than $80 billion in long-term debt. Its Tyco Global Network of undersea fiber optic cable ran into the dot-com crash and lost over $3 billion, forcing write-downs in 2002.

Kozlowski resigned in mid-2002 amid an SEC civil fraud investigation, and he and CFO Mark Swartz were accused of taking over $150 million from the company, arguing at trial that the board had authorized the payments. The 2004 trial ended in a mistrial after juror Ruth Jordan allegedly made an OK sign and received threats. In 2005 both men were convicted and sentenced to 8 1/3 to 25 years in New York state prison. New CEO Edward Breen, who took over in July 2002, replaced the board and mandated ethics training, Tyco paid $2.92 billion in 2007 to settle a shareholder class action, and in 2010 a judge applied the faithless servant doctrine to void about $500 million of Kozlowski's 1997 to 2002 compensation. He was paroled in 2014.

• One expense from the era was a $15,000 umbrella stand.
• Tyco paid a $1.1 million Clean Air Act penalty over trichloroethylene at a New Jersey facility.
• Managers at a Connecticut plant were criminally convicted for routing wastewater around filters, sending copper and lead into the sewer.
• Tyco ranked 41st on the Toxic 100 list.
• In 2007 Tyco was split into three separate independent companies.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

John DeLorean left General Motors in 1973 and founded the DeLorean Motor Company in 1975, raising money from entertainers including Sammy Davis Jr., Roy Clark and Johnny Carson and requiring dealers to buy shares to win the right to sell the car. Ireland's Minister for Industry and Commerce, Desmond O'Malley, rejected his pitch as too good to be true, and a Puerto Rico deal fell through when the British government offered roughly $120 million of the $200 million startup cost to build in Dunmurry, near Belfast, during the Troubles. The 660,000 square foot plant and test track went up in 16 months, but production slipped from 1979 to early 1981 and much of the workforce had never worked in heavy manufacturing.

Quality problems with the gullwing doors, panel gaps and alternators forced the company to rebuild cars at quality assurance centers in California, New Jersey and Michigan. The unpainted stainless steel car listed at $25,000, took about 10.5 seconds to reach 60 mph, and sold around 6,000 units against a break-even of 10,000 to 12,000. The SEC halted a $27 million stock issue, Bank of America sued, and Britain withheld further aid. In October 1982 DeLorean was arrested after an FBI videotape caught him discussing a $24 million cocaine deal, hours after Britain announced the factory's closure. Attorney Howard Weitzman argued entrapment, and the jury acquitted him of all charges.

• Local legend held the Dunmurry site was cursed because crews destroyed a fairy fort.
• While the company bled cash, DeLorean pitched a DMC-24 sedan, a DMC-44 off-roader and a DMC-80 transit bus.
• The company tested translucent paints, but no factory-painted cars were ever sold.
• DeLorean later joked, would you buy a used car from me.
• About 2,500 Belfast workers lost their jobs, and leftover inventory was bought by the company that became Big Lots.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

At MIT's Lincoln Laboratory, Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson watched students line up for 15-minute turns on the small, interactive TX-0 while a faster IBM mainframe sat ignored. In 1957 venture capitalist Georges Doriot funded them on the condition that they keep the word computer out of the name and not sell one yet. Digital Equipment Corporation set up in a Civil War-era wool mill in Maynard, Massachusetts, sold circuit board modules, and was profitable in its first year. The PDP-1 arrived in 1960 and ran Spacewar, the PDP-8 of 1965 cost under $25,000 and launched the minicomputer era, and the 1970 PDP-11 used the Unibus to make peripherals easy to add, becoming the platform where Unix and C were developed.

The 32-bit VAX and its VAXcluster design let companies add machines instead of replacing them, and by the mid-1980s DEC had 100,000 employees and was second only to IBM. Its answer to the IBM PC in 1982 was three mutually incompatible machines, the Professional, DECmate II and Rainbow 100, plus RX50 floppies that required special preformatted disks. Factions fought over the costly VAX 9000 and a secret RISC workstation project, losses mounted, and in 1992 the board forced Olsen to resign. Robert Palmer bet on the 64-bit Alpha chip, the fastest microprocessor of its day, but Microsoft dropped Windows NT support. DEC sold off divisions, and in January 1998 Compaq bought what remained, mainly for its services organization.

• DEC registered the domain dec.com in 1985.
• Around 1977 Olsen said there was no reason for a person to want a computer at home, later clarifying he meant home automation.
• The Rdb database went to Oracle and the networking business to Cabletron.
• StrongARM and DEC's chip plants went to Intel, largely in a patent lawsuit settlement.
• DEC created the AltaVista search engine, and former engineers helped build Windows NT.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Alfred Escher founded the bank in 1856 to fund Swiss railways with domestic money rather than French capital, and the share offering drew such demand that far more was subscribed than planned. It financed the Gotthard Railway in 1882 and the national electrical grid, helped fund the disarming of French troops in 1870, and became Switzerland's largest bank. After World War II it moved into secretive private banking. Holocaust survivors' heirs struggled for decades to recover accounts, ending in a $1.25 billion settlement with Swiss banks in 2000. The 1970s Chiasso scandal funneled $900 million in Italian deposits into unauthorized investments, and in 1988 the bank put $725 million into partner First Boston after the burning bed junk bond deal and later took it over.

The bank weathered 2008 with under a billion dollars in subprime write-downs and no bailout. Then came a 2014 guilty plea and $2.6 billion fine for helping Americans hide assets, a 2019 scandal in which COO Pierre-Olivier Bouée had a departing executive followed, billions lost on Greensill Capital and Archegos Capital in 2021, and a 2022 conviction for failing to stop a Bulgarian cocaine ring's money laundering. In early 2023 it reported a 7.3 billion franc loss and material weaknesses in reporting controls. On March 15, 2023, the Saudi National Bank ruled out more support, the shares fell nearly 25 percent, and a 50 billion franc central bank lifeline failed to stop outflows. UBS bought the bank that weekend for $3.25 billion.

• The Swiss Secrets leak exposed details on 30,000 customers.
• The bank put the Savoy Hotel in Zurich up for sale and offered to buy back $3 billion of its own debt.
• Over $69 billion was withdrawn in the first quarter of 2023.
• Regulator FINMA wrote $17 billion in AT1 bonds down to zero while shareholders received a payout, and a Swiss court ruled in late 2025 that the write-down lacked a proper legal basis.
• Credit Suisse ceased to exist as a separate entity in May 2024.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

An offshore financial center, by the IMF's definition, is about who uses it, not where it sits: a jurisdiction serving non-residents on a scale far out of proportion to its own economy. In the 1960s and 1970s these centers held pools of eurodollars that escaped capital controls; once controls faded in the 1980s, they shifted to selling tax neutrality, levying no tax on funds passing through on the theory that investors pay at home. The University of Amsterdam's CORPNET study mapped 98 million corporate ownership connections and found 24 sink centers, such as the Cayman Islands, British Virgin Islands and Bermuda, where value comes to rest, and five conduits that route it there: the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, Singapore and Ireland.

Conduits matter because of their tax treaty networks, letting money move from a country like Germany to the Netherlands and then to Bermuda without withholding taxes. The episode walks through an Irish Section 110 special purpose vehicle that borrows from Deutsche Bank, buys Boeing engines and leases them to Delta, protected by orphan status and bankruptcy remoteness. Economist Gabriel Zucman puts annual corporate tax losses from profit shifting at over $200 billion, and Apple's double Irish structure moved $300 billion in intellectual property in 2015 before the EU levied a record $13 billion state aid ruling. Economist James R. Hines Jr. argues these centers help high-tax countries by easing cross-border investment.

• Shadow banking assets in the Cayman Islands were measured at 2,118 times GDP, versus 246 times in Luxembourg.
• Ireland's ratio is 13 times GDP and the Netherlands nearly nine times.
• In the double Irish, one Irish company was managed from Bermuda and collected royalties from a second Irish company.
• Anonymous shell companies are often easier to form in Delaware or Nevada than in the Cayman Islands.
• Verified ownership registers in some centers helped authorities trace and freeze Russian oligarch assets under sanctions.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1982 Texas Instruments managers Rod Canion, Jim Harris and Bill Murto sketched a portable computer on a placemat at a House of Pies in Houston, after considering opening Mexican restaurants instead. Backed by venture capitalist Ben Rosen, they built the nearly 30-pound Compaq Portable, fully compatible with the IBM PC, and spent $1 million on clean room reverse engineering so two separate teams could recreate IBM's BIOS without copying it. Compaq sold 53,000 units and reached $100 million in first-year revenue, the first startup ever to do so. In 1986, encouraged by Bill Gates, it shipped an Intel 386 PC before IBM, and it later led the Gang of Nine's open EISA standard against IBM's Micro Channel.

After a $71 million quarterly loss in 1991, Rosen secretly sent engineers to the Comdex trade show to prove a cheap PC could be built quickly from standard parts, and after a 14-hour board meeting Canion was fired. Employees protested and bought a newspaper ad thanking him. Eckhard Pfeiffer launched the Presario price war and made Compaq the world's top PC maker by 1994, then bought Tandem Computers in 1997 and Digital Equipment Corporation for $9.6 billion in 1998. As Dell's direct model gained ground, Rosen ousted Pfeiffer in 1999. Michael Capellas launched the iPAQ, but in 2001 Compaq agreed to a $24.2 billion merger with Hewlett-Packard, and the brand eventually became a licensed budget label.

• Compaq refused to bundle free software, betting on IBM compatibility alone.
• Canion's campus had no reserved parking, even for the CEO.
• The LTE became the first commercially successful notebook computer.
• Pfeiffer had stationed security guards on the eighth floor to control access to his office.
• The SEC penalized Deutsche Bank over proxy voting conflicts tied to the HP vote.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Harlan Sanders was born in 1890 near Henryville, Indiana, lost his father at five and was cooking for his siblings by seven while his mother worked at a canning plant. He left home at 13 and drifted through jobs as a farmhand, streetcar conductor, railroad fireman, insurance salesman and ferry operator, and practiced law in justice of the peace courts, where he got into a brawl with his own client. In 1930, at 40, he took over a Shell station on U.S. Route 25 in North Corbin, Kentucky, and began serving travelers from his own dining table. Governor Ruby Laffoon made him an honorary Kentucky Colonel in 1936, and he grew the business into the 142-seat Sanders Court & Café.

Pan-frying took 35 minutes, so after commercial pressure cookers arrived in 1939 he modified one to fry chicken in under 10, and in 1940 he settled his blend of 11 herbs and spices. When Interstate 75 bypassed Corbin in 1955, he auctioned his property and, at 65 and living on a $105 Social Security check, drove town to town licensing his recipe for four cents, later five, per chicken. His 1952 trial licensee, Pete Harman of South Salt Lake, Utah, had a sign painter named Don Anderson coin Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Harman introduced the bucket meal in 1957. By 1963 there were 600 locations. Sanders sold in 1964 for $2 million to investors led by John Y. Brown Jr. and Jack C. Massey, but stayed on as quality controller.

• Sanders adopted the white suit partly so flour stains would not show.
• Harman's 1957 bucket held 14 pieces of chicken, rolls and a pint of gravy, and he trademarked It's finger lickin' good.
• Corporate management backed L.S. Hartzog pressure fryers, which lacked oil filtration and sometimes exploded.
• Sanders championed Winston Shelton's 1969 Collectramatic fryer, and Brown's own father used it against his son's orders.
• When Sanders died in 1980 at 90, the chain had about 6,000 locations and $2 billion in annual sales.