2000: As investors begin "rotating" out of the Internet and into Old Economy stocks, the Dow Jones Industrial Average surges a record 499.19 points, putting the index up 8.35% for the previous two days. For the first time ever, investors turn over more than 500 million shares just in the first hour of New York Stock Exchange trading. "Things that used to take weeks to happen now happen in days," marvels Bill Schneider, head trader at Warburg Dillon Read.

The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 2000, p. C1

1999: The Dow Jones Industrial Average tops 10,000 for the first time.

The Wall Street Journal, March 17, 1999, pp. A1, C1

1933: President Franklin D. Roosevelt takes the U.S. off the gold standard, removing the yellow metal from coinage and circulation, even banning it as a collectible.

1930: Julius H. Barnes, who heads President Herbert Hoover's National Business Survey Conference, proclaims that "the spring of 1930 marks the end of a period of grave concern?. American business is steadily coming back to a normal level of prosperity." His judgment turns out to be premature — by nearly a decade.

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997, reprint of 1931 ed.), pp. 257-258.