Economy
Discover facts about economy. Small discoveries that change the way you see familiar things.
Economy
How export complexity predicted South Korea's rise
Forget standard GDP projections; the real secret to predicting a nation's future wealth is mapping out exactly how complicated its exports are. Economic…
Discover more
Saudi Arabia considered selling oil to China in yuan
The unspoken agreement that global oil is exclusively bought with American dollars is slowly fracturing under geopolitical spite. Since the 1970s, the…
Discover more
How Indians abroad helped steady the rupee
When a central bank is on the brink of a currency collapse, sometimes the best bailout doesn't come from the IMF, but from their own people living abroad.…
Discover more
When microloans turned into a debt crisis
Lending fifty dollars to an impoverished entrepreneur sounds like a Nobel Prize-winning idea until Wall Street gets involved. What started as a noble pursuit…
Discover more
Investors can bet on how badly a hurricane hits
If you ever wanted to monetize a natural disaster, financial engineering has you covered. Catastrophe bonds (Cat bonds) are high-yield debt instruments issued…
Discover more
How the Cowboys became worth billions without winning
In the warped reality of sports franchise economics, actual winning is completely irrelevant to the balance sheet. The Dallas Cowboys leveraged massive…
Discover more
STACKY FOR IPHONEA bigger world.
One discovery
at a time.
Keep discovering with Stacky. Interesting facts in an app that is always within reach.
How Wall Street profited from Puerto Rico's debt crisis
When Puerto Rico needed cash, Wall Street gladly served as the enabler, right up until the island financially suffocated. They created COFINA bonds, which…
Discover more
How an algorithm helped push up apartment rents
If you wonder why your rent jumped 30% in a year, blame an algorithm. A software company called RealPage convinced thousands of corporate landlords to hand…
Discover more
Bill Hwang lost $20 billion in a weekend
Bill Hwang executed the most spectacularly devastating margin call in modern history without anyone knowing he existed. Using financial derivatives called…
Discover more
Why Kenyan farmers rejected satellite drought insurance
Tech optimists assumed African farmers would eagerly buy weather insurance via text message, but they were completely wrong. Companies rolled out index-based…
Discover more
Pandemic bonds paid investors while Ebola relief went unfunded
The World Bank thought they could outsmart nature with financial derivatives. They issued 'pandemic bonds' designed to pay out to developing nations if a…
Discover more
Why central banks lend out their gold
Even central banks get incredibly bored just sitting on inert mountains of shiny metal. Instead of letting national reserves collect dust in an underground…
Discover more
JPMorgan bought nickel receipts backed by rocks
High finance is a sophisticated dance of risk management, until the exact moment a Wall Street bank opens a secure vault in Rotterdam and finds literal rocks.…
Discover more
New Zealand turned fishing quotas into tradable assets
Leave it to economists to look at a rapidly dying marine ecosystem and decide the solution is to invent a literal stock market for dead fish. Under New…
Discover more
Safaricom struggled to sell crop microinsurance because farmers distrusted payouts
Building financial safety nets is utterly useless if the target demographic thinks it's a scam. Despite the massive success of Kenya's M-Pesa mobile money…
Discover more
The labor system behind Qatar's World Cup stadiums
The dazzling, billion-dollar stadiums of the 2022 World Cup were built on a foundation of legalized extortion. Under the Middle Eastern Kafala system, migrant…
Discover more
How a recession can scar your entire career
Graduating during a financial apocalypse guarantees you will mathematically never catch up to the wealth of older generations. Economists track a phenomenon…
Discover more
Carillion collapse doomed British suppliers
A corporate giant didn't just die; it dragged thousands of small businesses into the grave through a web of unpaid IOUs. When British construction behemoth…
Discover more
The algorithm that links kidney donors into chains
Bartering human organs legally requires the exact same matchmaking logic as a complex dating app. Buying and selling kidneys is universally illegal, creating…
Discover more
How Russian oil can return to Europe through India
Western secondary sanctions on oil are less of an iron curtain and more of a deeply cynical carousel. When Europe banned direct imports of Russian crude to…
Discover more
How nighttime lights reveal a country's economy
Dictators love to fabricate their economic growth numbers, but they fundamentally can't hide from space. Because authoritarian regimes routinely cook their…
Discover more
Why grocery prices rise faster than they fall
Next time global wheat prices crash, don't expect your grocery bill to magically follow suit. Welcome to the 'rockets and feathers' phenomenon of pass-through…
Discover more
How M-Pesa became a walled garden for mobile money
The tech utopia of seamless digital transactions ends exactly where a corporate monopoly’s profit margins begin. For years, the revolutionary M-Pesa mobile…
Discover more
The medieval bank trick behind global trade
You don't ship a galleon full of expensive spices without absolute proof you'll get paid. The Letter of Credit—pioneered by Italian Renaissance banks like the…
Discover more