GOOD YEARS AND BAD, A THOUSAND TIME OVER: SEND BANKERS, GUNS AND MONEY: SOME MONUMENTAL, AND NOT SO MONUMENTAL, FINANCIAL EVENTS OF THE SECOND MILLENNIUM

1000 Y1K problem solved when world does not end. Coincidently in India, Sridhara recognizes the importance of zero, but since he didn’t use the Christian calendar, he couldn’t meaningfully write ‘000.

1081 Commercial treaty between Venice and Constantinople as Seljuk Turks squeeze the Eastern Empire.

1086 Domesday Book, one of the greatest bureaucratic projects in history, catalogs property ownership throughout England for William the Conqueror.

1096-1099 First Crusade revives European banking to finance food and fodder for its participants. Banks prosper as crusades continue for 175 years.

1100 English silver coinage debased.

1124 English mint masters have right hands cut off on Christmas Day. Quality of coinage improves.

1151 First fire and plague insurance issued — in Iceland, land of volcanoes.

1156 Two brothers borrow 115 Genoese pounds and promise to repay bank in Constantinople 460 gold bezants a month after they get there. International finance is born.

1174 Earliest recorded horse race in England.

1200 Enormous outdoor markets known as Champagne fairs held at crossroads of Provence, France, Flanders and Germany. Not as good as it sounds, since Dom Perignon wouldn’t invent the bottle cork — enabling him to drink stars, as the story goes — for almost 600 years.

1202 Leonardo Pisano Fibonacci introduces Indian numerals, to this day miscalled Arabic, to Europe. Bookkeepers, arithmetic teachers breathe at least MCCII sighs of relief.

1204 Venetians divert Fourth Crusade to seize Constantinople and start their own empire in a city with dry streets.

1209 Francis of Assisi, son of a merchant, issues rules for his brotherhood, forbidding them to own property, except for a pair of sandals and a robe. This is not good for retail.

1211 First known account ledgers in Florence, Italy. Probably started to keep track of goods sold on credit.

1215 Magna Carta restricts right of English king to raise taxes.

1252 Florence copies Constantinople, issuing gold coins that eventually lend their name to the abbreviation of the Dutch guilder (fl for florin), and the Hungarian forint.

1261 Michael VIII Palaeologos captures Constantinople from Venice, dries out streets.

1275-1292 Venetian Marco Polo in China. He tells fabulous tales when he returns, including one about — can you believe it? — people using paper for money and eating worm-like pieces of cooked dough in sauce. Pasta catches on quickly, but paper money takes 400 years.

1269 First toll roads in England. Can revenue-backed bonds be far behind?

1291 Cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden form Everlasting League of Swiss. Numbered bank accounts next.

1332 Bubonic plague starts spreading from India.

1347-1351 Black Death sweeps Europe. Severe population decline raises demand for labor. Peasants who survive begin to move throughout Europe, their living standards on the rise.

1355 Frenchman Nicole Orsme writes that the quantity of precious metal in circulation determines the value of currency. Light bulbs, metaphoric, of course, go on all over Europe.

1400s Economic growth in Europe leads to gold-gathering missions in Africa. West African cities Jenne and Timbuktu emerge as centers of gold trade.

1400 Medici Bank in Florence becomes most important financial institution in Europe. Patron of the arts and learning, too.

1407 Casa de San Giorgio, among first public banks, funds long-term municipal debt for city of Genoa.

1440 Johannes Gutenberg invents printing press. First adapted to mint coins, and two centuries later to print money as fast as paper can be fed.

1450 Mocha in southwestern Arabia becomes principal coffee-exporting port, well before Starbucks is founded.

1453 Turks take Constantinople, cut land route to East, end coinage of gold solidus, or bezant, predecessor of the euro. If they can’t walk to the East, European traders decide, they’ll sail there.

1463 Monte di Pietà at Orvieto, Italy, lends money to poor people at low interest rates. Idea does not catch on.

1473 Fuggers begin banking in Augsburg, Germany, for ruling Hapsburgs, found bank formally in 1487.

1489 The symbols + and – are introduced, enabling fund mangers of the future to report results.

1492 Christopher Columbus, Italian merchant financed by Spain, miscalculates circumference of Earth, finds America instead of China.

1494 Double-entry bookkeeping popularized by Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli, who had taken a vow of poverty and wanted to see what he was missing. Twice. Grand Prince Ivan III Kalita (“Money-bags”) expels Hanseatic traders from Muscovy. 1497-1522 Portugal colonizes the Indian Ocean littoral, literally, sails on to China and then around the world. Capital and foreign exchange markets develop to finance trade.

1500 First lead pencils used in England; eraser has to wait.

1509 Jakob Fugger lends Emperor Maximilian 170,000 ducats to finance war against Venice.

1514 Fugger, the conglomerate, gains rights to market indulgences — those get-out-of-purgatory-free cards — in Germany. 1517 Martin Luther, opposing such marketing, nails his 95 theses to Wittenberg church door. Before you know it, Protestant ethic arises.

1519 Hernando Cortes conquers Mexico for Spain, starts shipping a ton or so of gold a year back home to his Hapsburg king. 1519 First Thaler, corrupted by English-speakers into dollar, minted in Bohemia.

1520 Fugger, Europe’s first international financier, bankrolls Charles V’s election as Holy Roman emperor. At its peak, Fugger owns 25 branch offices as well as silver, gold, copper and mercury mines throughout Europe. His firm’s capitali zation is 10 times that of the Medici bank.

1531 Antwerp bourse — French for purse — opens in what is now Belgium “to the merchants of every nation or language.” 1545 Spanish explorers discover six-mile-around mountain of silver at Potosi in what is now Bolivia. Spanish galleons begin to lug the stuff homeward from Acapulco. Later, Chinese junks visit Philippines, named for Philip II of Spain, to trade spices, silks and porcelain for Mexican silver and gold.

1558 Hamburg exchange founded. No helpers needed.

1560 Thomas Gresham lays down the law: Bad money drives out good.

1562 Capt. John Hawkins begins the great triangular trade for England — cheap manufactured goods to Africa, slaves to the Americas, rum, sugar and other raw materials to Blighty.

1568 Alexander Nowell, dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, invents bottled beer. Caps off!

1576 Francois Viète introduces decimals, something the New York Stock Exchange hasn’t yet managed to do.

1577-1580 Francis Drake circumnavigates globe as he and other English pirates hijack Spanish treasure ships in both Atlantic and Pacific. He’s knighted the next year.

1583 Earliest known life insurance policy issued for William Gibbons. He wins, dying during the policy’s one-year term.

1590 New World silver and gold, which increases money supply, brings tripling of prices over the century. Otherwise stagnant economy leads to lots of idle hands and a resulting population explosion.

1591 Viète introduces letters to represent unknown quantities, something the Big Board is good at.

1599 Holland tries to corner pepper and nutmeg market, nothing to sneeze at. First chamber of commerce organized, in Marseilles; first postal rates set, in Germany; Globe Theater built, in London. If they’d been in the same place, the publicity business could have started 300 years sooner.

1600 Elizabeth I charters Honorable East India Co. to muscle into Portuguese and Dutch spice trade. As it turns out, English spend all the gold and silver English pirates have stolen from the Spanish, and then some, on imports from the East, causing depression at home.

1602 Dutch East India Co. founded, first modern public company. In your face, Betty Tudor.

1621 Dutch West India Co. founded, makes nice deal for island with Manhattan Indians. Who fared better? If the $24 of lore had been invested at 8% compounded annually, it would be worth $95.68 trillion today. How do you say “miracle of compounding” in Algonquin?

1634-1637 Tulipmania in Holland. Some economists today argue it made sense to trade a single tulip bulb for 12 acres of land.

1640 Oliver Cromwell and his Puritans execute Charles I, outlaw luxury. East India Co.’s business shrivels.

1662 Portuguese Princess Catherine of Braganza marries Britain’s restored Charles II, bringing a dowry of unknown things: tea, china, silk, fancy furniture, calico, spices. Also a swampy far-away town called Bombay. The beauty-starved Brits take to this exoticism like a teenager takes to too-big pants.

1664 Peter Stuyvesant borrows 5,000 guilders in wampum to build a citadel against English invasion of Niew Amsterdam. The city’s northern wall ran across the island of Manhattan along what is now, you guessed it, Wall Street.

1667 Treaty of Breda lets British keep captured rocky island of Manhattan and rest of Niew Netherlands and Dutch keep captured nutmeg-rich island of Run and rest of Spice Islands. Before laughing too hard, consider that Brits were bounced in 1776, while Dutch hung on to East Indies another 170 years.

1670 Minute hands on watches. Can day trading be far behind?

1680 First reference to coffeehouse owned by Thomas Lloyd of Tower Street, London, where shippers and skippers meet to establish contracts. Thus began Lloyd’s of London.

1690 Massachusetts Bay Colony becomes first in America to issue paper money.

1694 Bank of England opens, invents permanent loan. The Crown would pay interest, but never retire the principal, much like a bond mutual fund.

1705 John Law, a Scot, anticipates John Maynard Keynes by 225 years, arguing that you can’t count on metallic money but bank notes managed by a public bank would keep the economy humming along.

1716-1720 John Law creates France’s first bank, persuades French regent to charter Mississippi Co. to exploit Louisiana and its monopoly on trade with the Far East. Stock soars, but that unreliable hard money flees to London for safety. Collapse sets Law waffling off to what is now Belgium.

1720 In London, South Sea Co., founded to break Spanish monopoly on trade with Latin America, offers to take over British national debt. Its stock and those of imitators soar, but proving that financial silliness isn’t limited to Continent, whole thing collapses like an English omelette.

1729 Philadelphia printer Benjamin Franklin writes book on need for paper money. It works. He gets contract to print it. 1760 Wampum factory in New Jersey uses steel drill to make holes to string shells together. Increased output brings inflation.

1764 Colonies forbidden to issue paper money; wampum OK.

1775-1783 American Revolution. Paper money that financed it isn’t worth a continental. First financial markets in United States develop to trade in government debt. Continental Congress passes nation’s first pension law, granting disabled

veterans half pay for life. The catch: states must pay because Congress doesn’t have authority or money to make payments. 1776 Adam Smith writes “The Wealth of Nations.” Says paper money is best.

1784 Bank of New York, oldest still in operation in United States, opens.

1787 Shays Rebellion. More than 1,000 war-weary farmers march on Massachusetts arsenal, demanding debt relief.

1789 Fiscal crisis in France prompts government to call national legislature for first time in decades to discuss taxation. Instead, revolution heads agenda.

1791 Presbyterian Church gives pensions to clerical widows and orphans. Elsewhere, First Bank of the United States founded — a triumph for Alexander Hamilton’s economic program, which emphasizes strong central state and centralized control over finance. And he’s a hero to Republicans?

1792 Congress adopts dollar, divided into 100 cents. A penny for your thoughts.

1792 Twenty-four brokers in New York meet under buttonwood tree to sign pact creating what grows into New York Stock Exchange. Panic strikes as speculator William Duer o’er reaches and is clapped into debtors’ prison. Secretary of the Tre asury Hamilton straightens things out by — ominous date — April 16.

1797-1821 Britain leaves gold standard temporarily, sparking debate over role of central bank and nature of money.

1798 Nathan Mayer Rothschild moves to England from family’s Frankfurt headquarters, becomes principal financier for anti-French governments.

1803 Napoleon, short of cash, sells Louisiana to the United States for $15 million. British banks lend the money and, despite war and blockade, get it through to Paris.

1809 United States’ first bank failure: Farmer’s Bank of Gloucester, R.I. Wait til 1933!

1811 Charter of First Bank of the United States expires. Bank shuts down. State banks more than double in number in four years, but many quickly fail.

1816 Second Bank of the United States chartered. After public fails to buy enough stock, Philadelphia merchant Stephen Girard buys remaining $3 million, resells it.

1818 Karl Marx born; first steamship crosses Atlantic.

1826 Stockbroker Nathaniel Prime establishes Prime Ward & King, generally thought to be nation’s first investment bank. 1823 Nicholas Biddle heads Second Bank of the United States, which starts to smooth market fluctuations and to monitor overall levels of commercial activity.

1830 Baltimore and Ohio Railroad starts passenger service.

1832 U.S. lotteries finance roads, canals, schools, churches, jails and raise money to help heavily indebted heirs of Thomas Jefferson keep Monticello.

1832 Charter of Second Bank of the United States not renewed by Andrew Jackson, whose appeal to newly enfranchised farmers and workers, driven by attacks on “money power,” carries him to second term.

1833 Jackson takes federal money out of Second Bank, deposits it around country in banks known as pets, actually lap dogs. Meow.

1837 Speculation in Western land leads to panic and bank collapse. Eight states and territory of Florida, which had borrowed money from Europe to finance canal and railroad construction, repudiate debt. European banks yank remaining U.S. loans, don’t invest again for decade.

1840 U.S. establishes independent Treasury.

1841 Second Bank of United States, now just private bank, folds.

1840s Unregulated curb brokers deal in railroad securities, with little interest in reliability or availability of financial information on new companies.

1844 Samuel F.B. Morse sends first telegraph message “What hath God wrought!” Not a question, but the answer anyway: Wirehouses, of course.

1846-48 United States beats up on Mexico, gains California, New Mexico, parts of four other states; railroad bonds look much better.

1848 Eighty-two merchants and businessmen meet in a rented room over a flour store on South Water Street to found the Chicago Board of Trade.

1848 Gold discovered in California, speeding settlement and leading to Valley girls and Darth Vader. Revolution shakes thrones and finance across Europe, spurs emigration to America and Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish “The Communist Manifesto”: “The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.”

1852 Credit Mobilier founded in France, first bank specifically created to finance industry and infrastructure. First Congress of Co-operatives meets in London. Can mutual funds be far behind?

1853 New York Stock Exchange establishes first disclosure requirements. Companies that can’t comply — such as railroads and industrials — must trade on Curb, the outdoor market. Internet stocks don’t know how good they have it.

1857 Panic in United States, the worst yet, triggers European bank failures because of heavy foreign investment. Trouble starts with a July 4 brawl in New York between two gangs, Dead Rabbits and Five Pointers. Soon industry in North wanes even as the South, with King Cotton, prospers.

1860 Anticipating feminism, value of women in Uganda reaches 500 times what it was at start of century. Bride price in

1800 was two cowrie shells; by 1860, 1,000 are needed.

1861 Civil War sparks Jay Cooke, most inventive banker of his era and later chief rival of J.P. Morgan, to mount massive propaganda campaign to advertise war bonds across country, shocking established banking houses.

1862 Legal Tender Act permits Congress to print unbacked Treasury notes, or greenbacks, to pay for war.

1863 Open Board of Stock Brokers competes with New York Stock Exchange. More than 20 new exchanges mushroom in New York to speculate in government debt and commodities, but disappear when war ends.

1863 National Bank Act creates national currency, establishes easy-to-start national banks, which along with state-chartered institutions, reach the astounding total of almost 30,000 by 1921, or one for every 3,500 people.

1865 Civil War ends, leading to start of withdrawal of greenbacks, which now are worth only half face value.

1866 State bank notes taxed out of existence.

1867 Karl Marx writes “Das Kapital”: “When commercial capital occupies a position of unquestioned ascendancy, it everywhere constitutes a system of plunder.”

1868 Ooops! Too little money too soon in United States. Greenback circulation increased.

1869 New York Stock Exchange and Open Board of Stock Brokers merge, adopt specialist system. Railroad manipulator Jay

Gould tries to corner gold market. His bid ends on Black Friday, when future President James Garfield stands at Broad and Wall streets and shouts “Fellow citizens, God reigns and the government in Washington still lives! I am instructed to inform you that the secretary of the Treasury has placed 10 million in gold upon the market!”

1870 Junius Morgan, father of J. P. Morgan, lends money to French government, putting him in a league with Rothschilds. 1873 Cooke & Co., Jay Cooke’s bank, closes after he tries to underwrite tremendous bond issue by Northern Pacific

Railroad, but finds public relations tricks aren’t working. Panic shutters many banks in the United States and Germany. J.P. Morgan escapes unscathed, fills vacuum left by Cooke, and then some.

1874 Chicago Produce Exchange organized to trade butter, eggs, other things to eat. Later becomes Chicago Mercantile Exchange. A century later, fancier futures leave pork bellies in dust.

1875 American Express Co. launches first U.S. corporate pension plan. It’s unfunded, and benefits go only to employees who are injured or “worn out in service”; nothing to green card holders.

1878 Bland-Allison Act forces Treasury to buy silver, fixes rate of exchange with gold.

1879 Greenbacks become fully convertible into gold. So what? Nobody cares at the time, but 20 years of deflation ensue. 1884 Charles Henry Dow publishes his first stock average — based on 11 stocks, including nine railroads. A springtime panic caused by stock manipulation and outright theft by bank insiders leaves by yearend barely a ripple on financial sea of tranquility.

1890 Owners of Baring Brothers & Co., unable to sell Argentine bonds, go hat in hand to Bank of England. Central bank decides, for first time anywhere, a bank is too big to fail.

1893 Hundreds of banks fail in what was known until 1930s as the Great Depression. Many railroads and industries founder. J.P. Morgan & Co. starts to reorganize railroads. Democratic President Grover Cleveland ends Treasury purchase of silver at behest of Wall Street.

1895 Populist pressure for bimetallic standard scares foreign investors and gold out of U.S. J.P. Morgan teams with Rothschilds to sell gold to Treasury, becoming effectively U.S. central bank.

1896 Silver-backer William Jennings Bryan wins Democratic presidential nomination with speech ending,”You shall not crucify us on this cross of gold.” He loses to gold bug William McKinley as gold is discovered in Alaska, Canada, Austra lia and South Africa, rendering crucifixion moot.

1898 Spain defeated in “splendid little war,” giving United States shirttail — all that’s left — of Spain’s 400-year-old empire.

1901 J.P. Morgan organizes $1 billion United States Steel Corp., first corporate behemoth, as he an battles James Hill, Edward H. Harriman, William Rockefeller and Kuhn Loeb & Co. to corner, or control, Northern Pacific Railroad and its a ccess to Chicago from the West. Its stock soars sky-high — it closed at $325 on May 9, up $165 but still $675 below its high for the day. Short-sellers incinerated. “Giants of Wall Street, in Fierce Battle for Mastery, Precipitate Crash

that Brings Down Hordes of Pygmies,” reads next day’s New York Herald headline.

1901 Andrew Carnegie starts U.S. Steel & Carnegie Pension Plan with $4 million from own pocket.

1901 Hormone adrenaline isolated, explaining much activity on world’s capital markets.

1903 Morgan founds International Mercantile Marine Co., owner of White Star Line and Titanic, the ship, not the movie.

1904 Steerage rates for immigrants to United States cut to $10.

1907 Congress restricts immigration.

1907 Knickerbocker Trust “rich man’s panic” ends when Morgan strongarms bankers to prop up the New York Stock Exchange and puts own neck and fortune on the line. In return, President Theodore Roosevelt allows United States Steel to swallow rival Tennessee Iron and Coal Corp. and puts trust-busting policy on round-the-world voyage of Great White Fleet to be dumped in Marianas Trench.

1909 John Moody in the mood to publish first bond ratings.

1912-13 House Banking and Currency Committee,investigates conspiracy to control economy. No conspiracy found, just a very small gentlemen’s club. Morgan testifies, dies of heart attack a few weeks later, some say from the shock.

1913 Federal Reserve System created with 12 district banks, replaces Morgan as regulator of nation’s money supply after he dies on April Fool’s Day.

1914-18 First World War. United States and Japan — which went in as debtor nations — emerge as lenders. Remember Pearl Harbor?

1915 Charles Lynch and Peter Merrill found little investment brokerage, Merrill Lynch & Co.

1920 Bomb explodes at 23 Wall St. — J.P. Morgan & Co.’s headquarters — killing dozens of pedestrians. Bomber never apprehended; scars still on building. Despite bomb and resulting Red Scare, Morgan & Co. bails out General Motors preside nt Will Durant, forces him to resign. He winds up running bowling alley in a GM company town, Flint, Mich.

1920 Original Ponzi scheme collapses. Charles Ponzi promised investors a 40% return on a 90-day loan to a fake postal coupon arbitrage firm. Of course he merely paid off old investors with new investors’ money. After prison, he’s involved

in land swindle, is deported to Italy.

1921 Curb traders move indoors to be New York Curb Exchange.

1924 Germany returns to gold standard; Federal Reserve adopts easy money policy. Edward Laffer starts Massachusetts Investors Trust, nation’s first open-end mutual fund; State Street Investment Trust arrives four months later, founded by Paul Cabot — both are in home of the bean and the cod.

1928 Dow Jones Industrial Average expands to current number of 30 stocks. No-load funds make the scene with Scudder

Stevens & Clark’s First Investment Counsel Corp. (now called Scudder Income Fund).

1929 After stock prices quadruple in five years, Harvard economist Irving Fisher says on Oct. 15, “I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher than it is today in a few months.” Dow peaks at 381.4, then crashes on Oct. 28. Twelv e suicides reported. By 1932, Fisher has lost $5 million — and his house.

1929 Bank of International Settlements established in Basel, Switzerland, to handle international exchange after rejuvenated gold standard fails.

1932 Dow bottoms out at 41.22, down 89% from 1929 peak.

1932-33 Pecora Investigation of Wall Street uncovers all manner of chicanery on the Street during the 1920s boom. Morgan’s son Jack testifies, suffers serious stroke just weeks later. Family blood pressure?

1933 President Franklin D. Roosevelt establishes Securities and Exchange Commission. Glass-Steagall Act creates Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to insure bank accounts and to separate investment and commercial banking functions, splitting

venerable institutions like the House of Morgan.

1934 Columbia University Professor Benjamin Graham and colleague David Dodd publish classic textbook on investing, “Security Analysis.”

1935 Federal Reserve Board granted power to adjust reserve requirements for member banks and to order banks to alter their rates, in part, to create liquidity to quench panics and prevent runs on banks.

1935 Social Security Act creates — what else? — Social Security .

1936 John Maynard Keynes publishes “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money,” catching up with John Law. 1939-45 World War II kills 60 million-plus, leaves Soviet bear facing U.S. eagle for hegemony of world.

1940 Investment Company Act requires investment banks and brokerages to register with SEC and to disclose detailed financial information. Also bars advisers from entering into profit-sharing arrangements with clients.

1944 Bretton Woods international conference establishes post-war global financial system of fixed exchange rates pegged to dollar, the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Whew!

1946 Hungary’s 1931 gold pengö now worth 130 trillion paper ones.

1946-52 Marshall Plan rebuilds shattered Western Europe. No reparations this time, except, of course, to Soviets.

1948 National Labor Relations Board rules pensions negotiable between unions and employers. Number of pension plans starts to grow as quickly as rabbits breed.

1949 Britain devalues pound by 30%, confirming the buck as world’s best buy.

1950-70 Japan’s economic miracle, fueled by its position as unsinkable American base during Korean War (1950-54), bastion of democracy and transistor afterward.

1952 Harry Markowitz publishes “Portfolio Selection” in Journal of Finance. Article presents method by which risk, for the first time, can be overtly recognized in investment decision making.

1953 New York Curb Exchange renamed American Stock Exchange after long quiescence.

1958 Long-term-bond yield exceeds dividend yield of stocks for first time, a condition that continues.

1961 SEC rules insider trading illegal.

1962 After 10-year bull market, Kennedy slide — the worst since 1929 — sees stocks lose 27% in first six months. Only rally comes at end of Cuban missile crisis in October. Have a cigar, Fidel.

1963-1974 Vietnam War derails President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society guns-and-butter plans, kills 57,000 Americans.

1964 William F. Sharpe produces capital asset pricing model, which says the single underlying factor connecting prices of all securities is the stock market itself. Also introduces “beta” as a measure of risk.

1965 Warren Buffett acquires floundering New England textile company Berkshire Hathaway. Eugene Fama lays foundation for development of index funds with paper concluding that stock prices aren’t predictable, but that markets are indeed ef ficient. So there.

1966 Interest rates on short-term securities exceed maximum rates on savings accounts. Investors pull money out of banks. Fed, catching on, immediately lowers interest rates.

1967 Yippie Abbie Hoffman showers New York Stock Exchange trading floor with dollar bills. Everybody notices.

1968 United States runs balance-of-trade deficit for first time since Great Depression of 1893. It’s beginning of long bad run.

1969 Germany revalues mark, sending shudders through Bretton Woods system.

1970 Penn Central Railroad goes belly up, setting new standard for world bankruptcy from standard railroad of the world. 1971 U.S. balance-of-payments deficit rises abruptly. President Richard Nixon ends convertibility of dollar for gold at

$35 an ounce. Two years later, Bretton Woods system tossed in favor of floating exchange rates. Reserve Fund, first mo ney market fund, established. NASDAQ automated stock trading system opens. It loses capitalization, or at least capital letters, in 1993.

1972 Dow Jones Industrial Average closes above 1000 for first time. Brokers rejoice in streets. With dollar and most other currencies floating, International Monetary Market in Chicago starts trading futures contracts on exchange rates. 1973 Fischer Black and Myron Scholes publish options pricing theory, neatly dovetailing with opening of Chicago Board Options Exchange. Cheering is optional.

1973 Federal Reserve lifts Regulation Q ceilings — fixed maximum interest rates for banks — on deposits of more than $100,000. Princeton Prof. Burton Malkiel publishes “A Random Walk Down Wall Street,” the theoretical underpinning of index mutual funds. Dartboards, anyone?

1974 Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries quadruples price of oil in wake of Yom Kippur War, putting world, at least temporarily, on oil standard. Franklin National Bank goes bust in largest bank failure in U.S. history. Commodit y Futures Trading Commission established to regulate booming commodity markets. Employment Retirement Income Security Act, comprehensive pension reform, becomes law. Fidelity Investments offers first mutual fund with check-writing privile ges. Banks offer toasters for new accounts.

1975 Fixed brokerage commissions abolished, leading to discount brokerages like Charles Schwab Corp. Vanguard Group also begins operation. Bear market has wiped out 60% of value of S&P 500 since 1973.

1976 International Money Market merges into Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Vanguard offers first index mutual fund, tracking, yup, Standard & Poor’s 500 stock index.

1977 Drexel Burnham Lambert starts underwriting junk bonds. Peter Lynch takes charge of Fidelity’s Magellan Fund, soon to be largest in world.

1978 Bankruptcy Reform Act establishes Chapter 11 debt reorganization for corporations and Chapter 7 debt forgiveness. By late 1990s, more than a million Americans a year will be filing for personal bankruptcy.

1979 Interest rates go through roof during Paul Volcker’s tenure as Fed chairman, prompting sharp recession and 10% unemployment. Consultant Theodore Benna finds loophole in Section 401(k) of revenue code and creates a new employee benefi ts plan, which IRS formally recognizes two years later.

1980 Hunt brothers of Texas drive silver prices to moon in ill-fated attempt to corner world market. Interest rate ceilings for banks rescinded.

1982 Garn-St. Germain Act deregulates thrifts, paving way for savings and loan crisis. Mexico suspends payments on its foreign debt, beginning Third World debt crisis. Oklahoma Penn Square Bank fails when it makes bad loans to energy-related firms, forcing federal bailout of Continental Bank of Illinois.

1986 Ivan Boesky pleads guilty to insider trading, pays $100 million fine.

1987 Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corp. declared insolvent. Taxpayer-financed bailout of S&Ls begins. Alan Greenspan becomes lucky 13th chairman of the Fed. Let the good times roll!

1987 Stock market falls 508 points on Oct. 19, at 23% the largest one-day decline ever. Crash is contained, as Dow ends year up 200 points from the low, at 1938.86.

1989 Wall comes tumbling down as Communism collapses in Europe. Free markets rule, more or less, except in China, North Korea, Vietnam and Cuba.

1990 Michael Milken, head of junk bonds at Drexel Burnham Lambert, guilty of insider trading. Company pays massive fine, goes bankrupt. S&P 500 drops 3.2%, its only down year of the decade. Bad news for George Bush, good news for Bill Clinton.

1992 Speculator George Soros makes $1 billion when he bets right way on devaluation of British pound.

1994 A year after the North American Free Trade Agreement goes into effect, Mexico devalues the peso. ¡Ai, caramba!

1994 California’s Orange County goes bankrupt using excessive leverage.

1996 Greenspan warns of “irrational exuberance” in stock market. Dow that day closes at 6437.10.

1997 Devaluation of Thai baht triggers Asian crisis. Tiger becomes sick puppy.

1998 Long-Term Capital Management, hedge fund run by two Nobel economists and a hero of “Liar’s Poker,” finds itself long on theory, short on cash as bad bets in Russia, which has devalued ruble and defaulted, force Federal Reserve Bank

of New York to organize rescue party. In near disaster’s wake, Greenspan makes three quarter-point cuts in short-term interest rates in quick succession.

1999 Euro used in Europe, but doesn’t exist as currency. Despite losing 58 cents a share, Amazon. com trades at $150 — sign of a new virtual paradigm or an old-fashioned bubble. Dow hits 10,000, then 11,000 — both ways, going up and coming back down.