William E. Douthat

In the late 1800s, two of the world’s most famous inventors, Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, were each engrossed in radical new devices that they hoped would change the lives of everyone living then, and everyone to live subsequently. Edison, the more famous of the two, would go on to be much more successful in this feat than his distant apprentice Tesla. Edison arguably changed the world more than any man before him with his invention of the incandescent light bulb, and whil

During a discussion I had with a friend about current economic conditions and excessive money printing, he asked in a satirical manner “has anything that bad ever really happened because of inflation?”  ​ “Have you ever heard of something called World War II?” I quipped back. ​ While not the direct cause, hyperinflation across Weimar Germany greatly exacerbated the anger the german population had towards the banking system, which at the time was run largely by Jewish citizens

The term Silicon Valley was born from a computer science journalist by the name of Don Hoefner in an article written for one of his local electronics publications. With the term he aimed to describe the multitude of companies whose products were made possible by their electronic transistors of which silicon was the main element. Not until the 1980s, though, did the term alter from a scarcely used word to a commonality in the jargon of the electronics industry. The popularity

On the week of December 6th 1951, thousands of financial professionals received in their mail that week’s issue of The Commercial and Financial Chronicle. Within the issue, an article entitled The Security I Like Best, written by an Omaha born Columbia graduate by the name of Warren E. Buffett, appeared on page 24. The article, which was part of a weekly series of stock recommendations, covered a small insurance company located in Washington D.C. named Government Employees In

For almost the entirety of the 20th century, the most essential decision posed upon the U.S. investor was that between the purchase of common stock in publicly held corporations and of fixed income securities, namely corporate and government bonds. The widely acknowledged dean of security analysis, Benjamin Graham, devoted an entire textbook, and in fact an entire life’s work, to intelligently deciding between these two investment vehicles. ​ What Graham could not have reason