Andrew Jackson Jr (March 15, 1767 – June 8, 1845)
On January 8, 1835, President Andrew Jackson achieved his
goal of entirely paying off the United States’ national debt. It
was the only time in U.S. history that the national debt stood
at zero, and it precipitated one of the worst financial crises in
American history.
On December 2, 2001, the Enron Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in a New York court, sparking one of the
largest corporate scandals in U.S. history.
On November 15, 1867, the first stock ticker was unveiled in New
York City. The advent of the ticker ultimately revolutionized the
stock market by making up-to-the-minute prices available to
investors around the country.
Prior to this development, information from the New York Stock Exchange, which has been around since 1792, traveled by mail
or messenger.
The ticker was the brainchild of Edward Calahan (1838-1912) who configured a telegraph machine to print stock quotes on streams
of paper tape (the same paper tape later used in ticker-tape
parades).
On December 2, 2001, the Enron Corporation filed for Chapter
11 bankruptcy protection in a New York court, sparking one of
the largest corporate scandals in U.S. history.
An energy-trading company based in Houston, Texas, Enron
was formed in 1985 as the merger of two gas companies,
Houston Natural Gas and Internorth. Under chairman and
CEO Kenneth Lay, Enron rose as high as number seven on
Fortune magazine’s list of the top 500 U.S. companies.
In 2000, the company employed 21,000 people and posted
revenue of $111 billion. Over the next year, however, Enron’s
stock price began a dramatic slide, dropping from $90.75 in
August 2000 to $0.26 by closing on November 30, 2001.
Enron’s collapse had cost investors billions of dollars, wiped
out some 5,600 jobs and liquidated almost $2.1 billion in
pension plans.
Kenneth Lee Lay (April 15, 1942 – July 5, 2006)
Black Tuesday hit Wall Street in 1929 as investors trade 16,410,030 shares on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day. Billions
of dollars were lost, wiping out thousands of investors, and stock
tickers ran hours behind because the machinery could not
handle the huge volume of trading. In the aftermath of Black
Tuesday, America and the rest of the industrialized world spiraled downward into the Great Depression.
