1933: Amid wildly divergent predictions about incoming President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who will be inaugurated the following day, the Dow Jones Industrial Average slumps 1.9% in intraday trading before recovering to close up smartly at 53.84, a 2.5% gain for the day. By July 18, the Dow will rise to 108.67, the fastest it has ever doubled in history.

John Brooks, Once in Golconda: A True Drama of Wall Street, 1920-1938 (Harper & Row, New York, 1969), pp. 149-150;Phyllis S. Pierce, ed., The Dow Jones Averages 1885-1980 (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1982), not paginated

1928: The Harvard Economic Society concludes, after studying statistics on business activity and the financial markets, that "intermediate declines in the stock market will not develop into such major movements as forecast business depression." A year-and-a-half later, the stock market crashes, setting off the Great Depression.

Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s (John Wiley & Sons, New York, 1997, reprint of 1931 ed.), p. 220.

1901: J.P. Morgan announces that he is organizing the largest corporation the world has yet seen by merging his Federal Steel conglomerate with Andrew Carnegie's Carnegie Co. The company is initially capitalized at $1.4 billion — the first billion-dollar company ever — four times the budget of the U.S. government and 7% of the gross national product. In a popular joke of the day, a schoolboy is asked about the history of the world. "God created the world in 4004 B.C.," he answers, "and it was reorganized by J.P. Morgan in 1901."

Jean Strouse, Morgan: American Financier (Random House, New York, 1999), p. 404;John Steele Gordon, "The Business of America," American Heritage, June, 2001, p. 22.

1882: In Lugo, Italy, outside of Bologna, Carlo Pietro Giovanni Guglielmo Tebaldo Ponzi is born. In 1903 he emigrates to Boston, renaming himself Charles Ponzi, and creates a financial phenomenon — promising to double investors' money every three months by speculating in foreign postage stamps to benefit from fluctuations in currency rates. Bostonians lose over $10 million on the scheme, and Ponzi's name becomes synonymous with any con game that pays new investors out of the money that belongs to the old ones.

Mitchell Zuckoff, Ponzi: The Man and His Legendary Scheme (Random House, New York, 2004), pp. 19-20.

1847: Alexander Graham Bell, father of the telephone, is born in Edinburgh, Scotland, to Alexander Melville Bell, a professor of speech and elocution, and Eliza Symonds Bell, a painter of miniature portraits.

Robert V. Bruce, Bell: Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 1990), p. 16