Money and markets
Five real newspaper headlines about money and markets, printed between 1901 and 2021, with their dates removed. Read each one and guess the year it was published. No multiple choice and no trivia questions, just the headline as it was printed.
There are 5 rounds of five in this topic, and a new one appears whenever the archive has enough for it.
Headline one
The New York Times
1901
J.P. Morgan completed the purchase and merger of Andrew Carnegie's steel empire with other companies to form United States Steel Corporation on March 2, 1901, capitalised at $1.4 billion — making it the world's first billion-dollar corporation. The deal shocked even Wall Street with its scale. US Steel controlled 67% of America's steel production and its creation marked the arrival of a new age of corporate capitalism.
Headline two
San Jose Mercury News
1980
Apple Computer Company went public on 12 December 1980 in one of the most successful initial public offerings in Wall Street history to that date. At $22 per share, the IPO raised $101 million and created more instant millionaires than any IPO since the Ford Motor Company's float in 1956. It valued the company founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in a California garage just four years earlier at nearly $1.8 billion.
Headline three
The Financial Times
1995
Barings Bank, Britain's oldest merchant bank and banker to the Queen, collapsed on 26 February 1995 after Singapore-based trader Nick Leeson accumulated losses of £827 million through unauthorised speculative trading in futures contracts. Leeson fled Singapore before the collapse was discovered and was later arrested in Germany. He served four years of a six-and-a-half-year sentence in a Singapore jail.
Headline four
The Wall Street Journal
2008
Bernie Madoff, a former chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange and one of Wall Street's most respected figures, was arrested on 11 December 2008 after confessing to running a Ponzi scheme estimated to have defrauded clients of up to $65 billion. His victims included charities, pension funds, banks and individual investors around the world. Madoff was sentenced to 150 years in prison, dying there in 2021.
Headline five
The Wall Street Journal
2021
Shares of video game retailer GameStop surged by approximately 1,700 per cent in January 2021, driven by coordinated buying from retail investors on the Reddit forum WallStreetBets. The frenzy caused catastrophic losses for hedge funds that had heavily shorted the stock, most notably Melvin Capital. The episode prompted congressional hearings and intense debate about market manipulation, democratisation of finance, and the power of social media.
Answer the five above to see your score.
Scoring works as it does in the daily game. Each headline is worth up to 100 points, and you lose two points for every year you are out. Being a decade wrong still earns you 80. A perfect round is 500.
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