2000: Juvenile delinquency spreads to online investing, as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission brings a case of securities fraud against a minor for the first time in its 66-year-history. The SEC alleges that on at least 11 occasions, Jonathan Lebed manipulated microcap stocks by posting hundreds of false and misleading statements at online message boards. Lebed, who racked up nearly $800,000 in illegal gains, was 14 years old at the time.

The Wall Street Journal, September 21, 2000, p. C1;Peter Carbonara, "The Kid and the Con Man," Money Magazine, March, 2001, pp. 82-92;The Wall Street Journal, October 20, 2000, p. C1

1980: On a quiet Saturday afternoon in his office at the Johnson Cos. in Newtown, Pa., benefits consultant Ted Benna realizes that a new provision of the Internal Revenue Code, Section 401(k), will permit retirement plans to use pre-tax payroll deductions and company matching contributions. "It was very simple, but no one had put the pieces together," he later recalls. "I attribute [my discovery] to prayer." The Johnson Cos. offers to sell the commercial rights to Benna's idea for $1 million, but two large insurance companies turn down the offer, failing to see any potential in it.

Ted Benna, interview with Jason Zweig, January 17, 2000.

1979: Lee A. Iacocca, who had been hired away from Ford the previous November, becomes chairman of Chrysler Corp., which is on the verge of bankruptcy. By 1982 Chrysler is back in the black (thanks largely to a $1.5 billion emergency loan from Uncle Sam) and Iacocca has become one of the best-known people on earth.

1959: The most powerful and famous banker in the U.S., Charles E. Mitchell of National City Bank, states flatly as he boards a transatlantic cruiseliner: "There is nothing to worry about in the financial situation in the United States." There will be less than five weeks later, when the Crash of 1929 ushers in the Great Depression.

Edward Angly, Oh Yeah? (Fraser Publishing Co., Burlington, VT, 1992 ed.), p. 50.

1873: The stock market crashes; Western Union falls from 75 to 54 1/2, and the NYSE Board of Governors closes the exchange for the first time on record. The cause of the plunge: A third of all money on loan from New York banks had gone into buying stocks on margin.

Jack W. Wilson, Richard E. Sylla and Charles P. Jones, "Financial Market Panics and Volatility in the Long Run, 1830-1988," p. 89, and Gary Gorton, "Banking Panics and the Stock Market in the Late 19th Century," p. 136, in Eugene N. White, ed., Crashes and Panics: Lessons from History (DowJones Irwin, Homewood, IL, 1990).

1851: President Millard Fillmore does his only memorable thing, signing into law the first Federal Land-Grant Act, which gives huge tracts of federally-owned land to railroads. In turn, the railroads built trackways across the land, then sell the adjacent lots at low prices to settlers from the East. This, more than anything else, explains how the West was won.

John F. Stover, The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads (Routledge, New York and London, 1999), pp. 32-33.