Category: Trends & News

The most hated man on the Internet was arrested yesterday. If you haven’t heard this story, his name is Martin Shkreli. He’s the guy who rose to infamy a few months ago when he increased the price of a life-saving medication by over 5,000%. Something tells me he’s not going to win any

When you think of the word ‘money’, the first thing to come to mind is probably those pieces of paper in your pocket. High school economics textbooks teach students that ‘money’ is a medium of exchange, a store of value, and a measure of account. And while all that fancy-sounding language may appropriately

Thousands of years ago in ancient city of Babylon, specially trained scribes gathered each day in the Temple of Marduk to record the day’s events. They used cuneiform writing instruments and clay tablets, over 1200 of which still survive today. These scribes kept excellent records, detailing astronomical observances and water levels of the

It started on December 8, 1931. Germany was in a world of pain at the time. They were still financially debilitated from having to make reparation payments after losing World War I, and had just barely recovered from one of the worst bouts of hyperinflation in recorded history. By the early 1930s, the

When I did the math in my head last week, I had to pull out my phone’s calculator just to make sure I hadn’t mentally misplaced the decimal point. It turns out I was right. My rental car in Cape Town would cost me just $8/day. And that included all the silly taxes

It was 1720, and Paris was completely mad. The city’s brand new stock exchange, located at the ultra-swanky Hotel de Soissons, swarmed with citizens of all stripes looking to get rich. Stocks were still a novel concept back then, and the allure of getting rich overnight was so appealing that people lined up

It’s time to get serious. One of the major themes of this daily e-letter is that major western governments are flat broke. This is not the first time that a major world power has gone bankrupt, and we need only to look to history to see the consequences. Thousands of years ago, as

This is WAY beyond ‘if you see something, say something.’ In a series of pamphlets circulated among local governments in the United Kingdom, British parents are now being encouraged to spy on their own children, and to report any instances of possible ‘radicalization’. Of course this advice comes with a nifty set of

First things first: Congratulations to Mark Zuckerberg. And no, not for the obvious. The Zuckerbergs are brand new parents. And while that’s exciting, it’s far from unique. New babies are born every second. But what’s far from commonplace is that Mark Zuckerberg just screwed the US government out of billions of dollars of

Talk about a difference between fantasy and reality. It was just a few weeks ago that the International Monetary Fund predicted that Saudi Arabia would likely be bankrupt within the next five years. Saudi Arabia’s financial position is deteriorating rapidly, and the government is burning through cash like a coked-up rock star. Just

They called it a “historic moment in international finance”. And so with great fanfare, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) announced yesterday that they would be including China’s renminbi in the basket of currencies that comprise their institutional monetary unit, the SDR. The IMF invented the SDR back in 1969 to be used as

On August 12, 1961, Walter Ulbricht, the Chairman of the State Council in East Germany, signed an order to close the border and begin building a wall around East Berlin. It happened quickly. Soldiers began tearing up the roads leading into West Berlin almost immediately and actually stood with weapons at the border

In astronomy, there’s an important concept known as ‘parallax’, which refers to how a star’s position appears to change based on the position and motion of the observer. The earth is constantly moving along its orbit around the sun. And as this happens, the position of a star in the night’s sky will