1850: The National Bank of Belgium is founded as a public limited-liability company. Its shares are still publicly traded — making it one of the world's only central banks you can still own a piece of — but NBB's stock has underperformed the Belgian market as a whole.

Lawrence Goldberg and Rezaul Kabir, "The Stock Market Performance of the Central Bank of Belgium," working paper, University of Miami, March, 2001, p. 3, at:

1818: Karl Marx is born in Trier, Germany. His life's work will inspire some of the most constructive reforms to capitalism, such as safer factories and expanded rights for workers. He is also morally responsible for the future murder of nearly100 million innocent people under Communist regimes.