On February 1, 2020, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman presented the Union Budget in a speech of about 2 hours and 40 minutes, the longest in India’s history. She stopped with two of its 45 pages still unread.
Her speech of 2019, at 2 hours and 15 minutes, had already broken the earlier record of Jaswant Singh.
In 1979 the United States began issuing a one-dollar coin with the portrait of Susan B. Anthony. The coin was widely confused with the quarter. It “received an overwhelmingly negative reception from the public.”
Production for circulation was suspended in 1981. The dollar bill stayed. The Anthony design was officially retired in 2000.
In 2001 the economists Brigitte Madrian and Dennis Shea published a study of a large U.S. company that switched its 401(k) retirement plan to automatic enrollment. New employees were “automatically and immediately enrolled in the 401(k) plan unless they made a negative election.”
“401(k) participation is significantly higher under automatic enrollment.” Employees hired under the new rule also tended to keep the default contribution rate and investment. The authors attributed this to “participant inertia” and to employees seeing the default as investment advice. They concluded that “large changes in savings behavior can be motivated simply by the power of suggestion.”
“Can’t somebody bring me a one-handed economist?” Harry Truman is often quoted as saying this about advisers who weighed both sides of every question. The economist Walter Heller told the story in the New York Times in 1974.
Quote Investigator found no solid contemporary evidence that Truman said it. The earliest similar version it found appeared on June 12, 1936, in a Scripps-Howard editorial: “what the Republicans need is a one-armed platform writer.”
“Until early 1994, the Fed did not issue a statement after an FOMC meeting,” the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis writes. The first statement in 1994 was “just four sentences.”
The explanations grew. “In April 2011, then-Chairman Ben Bernanke began the practice of holding a post-meeting news conference four times a year.”
Since 1979, a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey has followed the same group of Americans. When first interviewed, the 9,964 men and women were ages 14 to 22. By age 58, they had held an average of 12.9 jobs. For the survey, a job is “an uninterrupted period of work with a particular employer.”
Much of the changing happened early. Over 40 percent of these jobs were held from ages 18 to 24.
During the Great Depression, American policy makers “had no reliable measure of economic activity.” The Senate commissioned a study, and the economist Simon Kuznets carried it out. In 1934 he delivered “National Income, 1929–1932” to Congress as Senate Document No. 124.
In the same report Kuznets warned: “The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income.” He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1971.
In 2001 Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School told an alumni conference that companies give customers more than they can use: “overshooting is always inconceivable, and overshooting always happens.” His example: “Microsoft has way overshot what the customer needs.”
In Christensen’s theory of disruptive innovation, overshooting opens the way for rivals that are cheaper and simpler. Such an innovation becomes disruptive only in a market where customers are being given more than they need.
“The FOMC holds eight regularly scheduled meetings per year.” Each meeting of the Federal Reserve’s rate-setting committee ends with a published statement that gives the decision and the vote.
After the meeting of October 28, 2026, the statement read: “The Committee decided to maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 3-3/4 to 4 percent.” It was approved “by a 10 – 2 vote.” The dissenters were named: “Voting against the monetary policy action were Lisa D. Cook and Beth M. Hammack.”
The Federal Open Market Committee, which sets interest rates in the United States, meets behind closed doors. Its minutes are “released three weeks after each meeting.” Markets read them closely.
Later, the full record follows. The committee “currently releases the transcripts of its meetings after an interval of about five years.” Nearly every word of the discussion then becomes public.