AZnomics🤑 Wild Money
Frauds, squeezes, meltdowns, and trillion-dollar experiments — the stories from the last 30 years that textbooks haven't caught up with yet.
"Fortune named Enron "America's Most Innovative Company" six years in a row. Every word of it was a lie."
A $70 billion company that was almost entirely fiction
"Pets.com raised $82 million, spent $11 million on a Super Bowl ad, and was bankrupt nine months later."
$5 trillion evaporated when the market realised stories aren't businesses
"A dying video game retailer became a $28 billion company in three weeks because of a message board."
Reddit versus Wall Street — and for one glorious month, Reddit won
"Sam Bankman-Fried was on the cover of Forbes, Fortune, and GQ. He was arrested in the Bahamas three months later."
The second-richest person under 30 in the world — built on stolen money
"Between 2008 and 2022, the world's central banks created more money than in all of prior human history combined."
Central banks created money from nothing to save the world — and nobody knows the final bill
"A $5 semiconductor chip shut down car factories worth billions. A beached ship in Egypt cost the world $9 billion a day."
One stuck ship. One missing chip. How just-in-time became just-in-trouble
"Argentina was the tenth-richest country on earth in 1913. It has defaulted on its sovereign debt nine times since."
Nine sovereign defaults, 211% inflation, and a president with a chainsaw
"Liz Truss became Prime Minister on September 6, 2022. She resigned on October 20. The bond market killed her government faster than any election could."
Liz Truss announced £45 billion of unfunded tax cuts — the bond market ended her premiership in 38 days
"A single Bank of Japan rate hike in August 2024 wiped $6.4 trillion from global markets in three days."
Borrow cheap in Japan, invest everywhere else — until it all unwinds at once