Business History

President Jimmy Carter had a brother, and this brother LOVED beer. Billy Carter was a big 1970s celebrity and a struggling brewery decided to bet on him to revive its fortunes. Together they created Billy Beer and launched a huge ad campaign. The beverage was a global sensation... except nobody including Billy liked the taste. Billy Beer was a flop.
Billy Beer was emblematic of American brewing at the time. It was all bad beer and gimmicky marketing. Coincidentally, it was Jimmy Carter who would change that. He signed a new tax law that kickstarted the craft beer revolution which brought us some of modern America's most popular brews.
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Before 1450, books were written out by hand. It was slow and expensive. But Johannes Gutenberg borrowed a ton of money to create a printing press that could crank out Bibles and pamphlets and documents in huge numbers. Science, politics and philosophy were all up-ended.
For example, the Catholic Church seized on the invention to sell special certificates absolving people of their sins - a move that made money, but caused a permanent schism in Christianity.
And Gutenberg too found himself in trouble - when a financier sued the inventor to reclaim his loan, plus interest.
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Jay Gould became hugely rich without ever really making a product or offering a service to benefit his customers. Other "Robber Barons" in the 19th century forged steel or pumped oil to make money - but Gould preferred to manipulate the stock market or bribe judges and politicians to generate a profit.
Even when he was fired from the railway company he mismanaged, he used this inside information to profit from the soaring share price. No one liked Jay Gould - indeed many people physically assaulted him because of his awful behaviour - but his real legacy was the raft of laws America passed to try to prevent such a businessman ever rising to power again.
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Business History will be back on July 22nd - but here's an episode from another Pushkin Industries show we're sure you''ll enjoy, Cautionary Tales.
A giant chemical plant near the small village of Flixborough, England, is busy churning out a key ingredient of nylon 6, a material used in everything from stockings to toothbrushes to electronics. When a reactor vessel fails, the engineers improvise a quick-fix workaround, so the plant can keep up with demand. Before long, the temporary patch - a small, bent pipe - becomes a permanent part of the factory, and the people of Flixborough unknowingly drift towards disaster.
Listen to more Cautionary Tales whenever you get your podcasts.
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John Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage - the trick of buying an asset cheap in one place and quickly selling it for a profit in another.
When he parted ways with Salomon Brothers, Meriwether took his "nerds" to set up a hedge fund. They prospered - making themselves and their clients rich. Two employees even picked up a Nobel Prize. But Long Term Capital Management operated in the real world - where projections and charts and formulas can't protect you from political chaos and economic turmoil.
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