1958: LIFE Magazine highlights a strange new phenomenon: The public is investing in the stock market as never before. "On the average," reports LIFE, "500,000 new customers a year have been getting into the market and 8.6 million Americans now own some kind of common or preferred stock?. To an extent which our founding fathers could never have foreseen, we live today under a genuine people's capitalism, in which the stock market has become everybody's business." The Dow Jones Industrial Average is around 500, but a "prominent market observer" (probably choosing to remain anonymous because his forecast sounds so crazy) predicts that "Just inflation alone will some day carry the Dow-Jones average over 1,000." Imagine that.

LIFE, September 15, 1958, pp. 93-106.

1890: Baring Brothers, one of England's leading investment banks, has disclosed that its loans to what we would now call "emerging markets," like Argentina and Chile, have gone bad and that the firm will go bust unless the Bank of England comes to its aid. The Bank steps in, rounding up a rescue syndicate of other investment banks and assuming 28.5 million pounds' worth of Barings' liabilities. "Thus was averted what would probably have been the greatest panic in the world's history."

Clement Juglar, A Brief History of Panics and Their Periodic Occurrence in the United States (G.P. Putnam's, New York, 1916;reprinted, Fraser Publishing Co., Burlington, VT, 1993), pp. 140-141.