1885: Louis B. Mayer is born near Minsk, Russia. After immigrating to Canada and working in the theater business in Boston, he wends his way to Hollywood in 1920, where he forms Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios and becomes one of the founding giants of the American entertainment industry.
1946: Michael Robert Milken is born in Encino, Calif., to accountant Bernard Milken and homemaker Ferne Milken. He goes on to dominate the junk-bond underwriting business in the 1980s, fueling the takeovers and leveraged buyouts that streamlined American industry.
1988: Happy Fourth of July! "The American century is over," declares former U.S. Department of Commerce official Clyde Prestowitz in Time Magazine. "The big development in the latter part of the century is the emergence of Japan as a major superpower." Time's article imagines a scene in 1992: The U.S. president kowtows to the Japanese prime minister to prevent Japanese investors from dumping U.S. Treasury bonds. Time declares that "at a time of constant warnings that the U.S. is in decline, Japan, above all other nations, is on the rise." Less than a year-and-a-half after Time's article, the Japanese stock market crashes and its economy goes into the worst recession any modern industrialized nation has suffered.
|
