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In the early 1530s, a Spanish conquistador named Diego de Ordaz was exploring modern-day Venezuela when he first heard rumors of a nearby City of Gold. Ordaz thought he was about to hit the jackpot. And he wasted no time ordering expeditions of the area to find this city– what eventually became known
Nearly seven centuries ago in the mid-1300s, the first major outbreak of the Bubonic Plague forced Europeans into some of the harshest social distancing measures in history. As Boccacio wrote in The Decameron in 1353, the hysteria was so extreme that “brother abandoned brother. . . fathers and mothers refused to see and
Well this is starting to become a trend. Over the past few weeks, state governments across the Land of the Free have been feverishly proposing new legislation that will virtually guarantee the entire insurance industry is wiped out. The root of the issue has to do with something called business interruption insurance. Business
For this week’s round-up of articles, we noticed a theme: the most alarming articles are about governments going over-the-top, grabbing powers in the name of stopping the Coronavirus. Here are some examples that we found absurd, and downright creepy: WHO officials says next step could be separating families A World Health Organization official
Earlier this week we talked about why the economic consequences of this pandemic could last a lot longer than what a lot of people expect. Now, I say all of this from a position of complete ignorance and uncertainty. Nobody knows what’s going to happen next, or how long this pandemic will last.
The big story over the last few days has been ‘reopening the economy’. And that’s certainly a nice idea. Countless people have been living in despair over the last month, and the prospect of everything going back to normal soon feels really great. I certainly hope for the best. But a couple of
By the mid-6th century BC, Darius the Great was ‘King of Kings’, ruling over the vast Achaemenid Empire. By that time, gold and silver had already been in use by earlier civilizations for thousands of years. There are cuneiform tablets that are nearly 4,000 years old from ancient Sumeria which record commercial transactions
In the words of Rahm Emanuel, former Chief of Staff to Barack Obama, “never let a good crisis go to waste.” Emanuel first said this during the 2008/2009 financial crisis… meaning that politicians can use a crisis as an opportunity to push through radical ideas that would otherwise never be accepted. Late last
Well, it’s official. Bernie Sanders dropped out of the US Presidential race yesterday. This leaves Joe Biden– a career politician with obvious signs of dementia– as the presumptive opposition candidate. To be clear, I’m not making light of Biden’s mental health. Tens of millions of people around the world suffer from dementia. It’s
I think one of the funniest movies of the 1980s was Brewster’s Millions. In the movie, Richard Pryor plays Monty Brewster, a minor league baseball player who finds out that he is in line to inherit a vast $300 million fortune. In order to inherit the money, though, Brewster must spend $30 million
In the early 1980s, doctors and medical researchers around the world were confounded by the growing number of young, otherwise healthy patients who were dying of rare infections that typically only occurred in people with very weak immune systems. The situation was so alarming that the CDC in the United States set up
Are you ready for this week’s absurdity? Here’s our Friday roll-up of the most ridiculous stories from around the world that are threats to your liberty, your finances, and your prosperity… and on occasion, poetic justice. Street Gangs enforce lockdowns in Brazil Last week we highlighted how Brazil’s president claimed Brazilians don’t get
By the mid 1300s, the Republic of Florence in modern day Italy had experienced one of the greatest economic booms in human history. In less than a century, Florence had grown from a tiny, irrelevant backwater to become one of Europe’s largest cities and preeminent financial center. The expansion was truly impressive. Florence’s
First thing’s first– I screwed up. Yesterday I wrote to you about the US government’s initiative to loan money to small businesses, and I was wrong about an important detail. I said the maximum amount of the loan was equal to 2.5x a company’s annual payroll expense. That’s incorrect. The correct maximum loan
[Editor’s note: this article was corrected on 30 March 2020; the proper way to calculate your loan is based on your average monthly (not annual) payroll multiplied by 2.5] As you’ve probably already heard, the US government unleashed a giant tsunami of money on Friday, passing a $2 trillion stimulus bill to help