2001: Abby Joseph Cohen, chief investment strategist at Goldman Sachs and Wall Street's most influential seer, forecasts that the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index will close the year at 1,650 and that the Dow Jones Industrial Average will finish out 2001 at 13,000. "We do not expect a recession," says Cohen, "and believe that corporate profits are likely to grow at close to trend growth rates later this year." But a recession has already begun, and the S&P 500 closes out 2001 at 1148.08, while the Dow ends the year at 10,021.50 — 30.4% and 22.9% below her forecasts, respectively.

The Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2001, p. C1;The New York Times, March 8, 2001, p. C4;USA Today, March 8, 2001, p. B1.

1932: Thousands of Ford Motor Co. workers stage a "Hunger March" to the immense River Rouge factory complex, protesting Henry Ford's decision to cut the company's minimum wage from $7 per day to $4 per day. Firemen and police open fire on the marchers with water, tear gas and guns; four of the protesters are killed, 20 are wounded.

Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-1933 (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, and London, 1985), p. 374

1930: President Herbert Hoover states firmly: "All the evidence indicates that the worst effects of the Crash upon unemployment will have passed during the next sixty days." He's wrong, but only by a few years.

Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 2000), p. 309.

1878: The Toronto Stock Exchange is incorporated; fewer than a dozen stocks are traded, and a seat on the exchange costs $250.

Museum of American Financial History

1876: Alexander Graham Bell receives U.S. Patent No. 174,465 for his "Improvement in Telegraphy." Bell makes his breakthrough sound about as exciting as getting your shoes polished: "My present invention consists in the employment of a vibratory or undulatory current of electricity in contradistinction to a merely intermittent or pulsatory current, and of a method of, and apparatus for, producing electrical undulations upon the line-wire." But the telephone changes human life forever.