1884: Charles Henry Dow, partner in Dow Jones & Co., publishes the first modern index of American stocks in his “Customer’s Afternoon Letter,” a two-page financial bulletin. The 11 stocks include nine railroads (Chicago & North Western, Delaware, Lackawanna & Western, Lake Shore, New York Central, St. Paul, Northern Pacific, Union Pacific, Missouri Pacific, and Louisville & Nashville), a steamship company (Pacific Mail), and telegraph giant Western Union.
1991: The Shenzhen Stock Exchange, after a six-month trial run, officially opens for trading as China’s second stock market.
2001: The European Union officially "prohibits" the proposed $43 billion merger of General Electric and Honeywell, the first time foreign authorities have nixed a major merger between U.S. corporations.
1863: Henry Ford, pioneer of the U.S. auto industry, is born on his family’s farm in Greenfield Township, Mich.
1914: Just weeks after the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo, stock exchanges in Berlin, Rome, and Vienna shut down as Austria declares war on Serbia. Investors panic in New York: General Motors plunges 34%, and Bethlehem Steel drops 14% (even though it makes the metal that will go into munitions if world war breaks out). The Dow Jones Industrial Average tumbles 6.9% to 71.42, on immense volume of 1,307,000 shares.
1912: Milton Friedman is born in Brooklyn to Ethel Landau Friedman, a storekeeper, and Jeno Saul Friedman, who dealt in “unsuccessful ‘jobbing’ ventures.” After decades as America’s leading conservative economist and one of the world’s greatest intellectual defenders of free markets, Friedman wins the Nobel Prize in economics in 1976.
1914: With war raging in Europe, the New York Stock Exchange closes -- and stays shut for another four-and-a-half months to allow the chaotic market to settle.
1944: Robert C. Merton is born in New York City, son of Columbia sociology professor Robert K. Merton. With Fischer Black and Myron Scholes, he goes on to develop the mathematics of options pricing. The good news: This mathematical model helps millions of Americans grow wealthy with stock options. The bad news: Merton and Scholes, as partners in the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, nearly capsize the global financial system with their leveraged trading in late 1998.
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