While 2016 is a year that lots of people would like to forget, it is also a year that no one is going to have any trouble remembering. Here are five stories about business and the global economy that made a big impression.

The Trump Election. Donald Trump’s Presidential election was obviously the biggest story of the year in politics, but it was also the biggest story of the year in business. In the weeks leading up to the election, the expectation on Wall Street was that a Trump victory would lead to a market crash. Trump’s lack of experience and his erratic temperament, coupled with his promises to clamp down on immigration and scrap free-trade deals, seemed like a recipe for the kind of uncertainty that investors are supposed to hate. In fact, as Trump’s victory began to seem more likely on Election Night, stock-market futures did tumble. But the Trump crash turned out to be among the most short-lived in history: by the time the stock market opened on November 9th, nearly all of the losses had been recouped, and by market close on that Wednesday, the Dow was actually up two hundred and fifty-seven points. In the weeks since, the Trump rally has only continued, with both the S. & P. and the Dow now near all-time highs.

What investors seem to have recognized is that, for all the uncertainty he will inject into the system, Trump will be extraordinarily friendly to corporate interests, while the Republican-controlled Congress can be counted on to shape policy in a way that’s beneficial to capital and to the wealthy. Many of the regulations enacted during the Obama Administration, including those on the financial industry, will be rolled back. Others will simply not be enforced, which is why it’s not surprising that banks have been among the biggest winners in the stock-market rally. Corporate-tax reform, which Republicans are going to try to enact, could not only slash rates but also allow companies to repatriate at a low tax rate the trillions of dollars they have stashed overseas. And while Trump’s plans for infrastructure spending and tax cuts would send the deficit ballooning, they’d also help fuel economic growth, which could also help corporate profits.

That’s not to say all investors have been thrilled by Trump’s victory. The bond market, in particular, has been crushed by his win, as worries over higher deficits have driven rates up and bond prices down. Businesses that depend heavily on foreign imports—or on exports, for that matter—are concerned that Trump could push for higher tariffs on foreign goods and spark a trade war. With conservative Republicans controlling Congress, however, it’s unlikely that Trump will be able to enact anything that interferes too much with free trade. The honeymoon period may not last, but for now, investors seem to have concluded that even if he turns out not to be good for anything else, Trump will at the very least be good for business.

Brexit. Trump’s election was, of course, only the second huge electoral surprise of the year. The first was the Brexit vote, in June, when British voters chose to leave the European Union. And as with Trump’s election, Brexit was not just a political story but very much a business one as well. Exiting the E.U. has the potential to wreak havoc on British banking, which is the country’s most important industry. As part of the E.U., British banks have so-called passporting rights, meaning they can do business in any European country. Leave supporters insist that the U.K. will be able to cut a deal with the E.U. to allow banks to keep those rights even after Brexit, but European policymakers aren’t giving any indication they will agree to such terms. Brexit also significantly complicates Britain’s trade relations not just with Europe but with the rest of the world (since all of its trade deals with other countries flow through the E.U.). Not surprisingly, then, Brexit hit the U.K. stock market hard and sent the value of the pound plummeting. European stock markets, meanwhile, also fell sharply on fears that Brexit might lead other countries to leave the E.U. as well. But, as with the Trump crash, the Brexit panic didn’t last. Perhaps in part because it hasn’t actually happened yet (though all the wheels are in motion), Brexit has so far not proved disastrous for the U.K. economy. The value of the pound remains low (not a bad thing, as it happens, for British exporters), but the U.K. stock market has rebounded and the economy has continued to grow.

Still, that Brexit’s effect on the British economy has been delayed doesn’t mean it won’t be real. And the Leave vote’s symbolic impact also resonated around the world, since it represented an embrace of nationalism over globalization. Indeed, the Leave campaign tapped into many of the same anxieties and fears that the Trump campaign did. Both traded on voters’ frustration with what they perceived as pointy-headed bureaucrats telling them how to live their lives. Both depicted globalization as a process that sacrificed jobs at home for jobs abroad. Both called for a renegotiation of trade deals. And both insidiously leveraged people’s fear of immigrants and outsiders. (Both also relied on a hefty dollop of false facts and fake promises to win over voters.) The abiding assumption of policymakers in most developed countries in the past two decades has been that the benefits of integrating into the global economy far outweigh the costs. Brexit, and Trump’s election, suggest that many voters disagree.

The Fifteen-Dollar Minimum Wage. When the “Fight for $15” movement to bring about a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage got started, four years ago, it seemed like a thoroughly quixotic quest. Previous increases in the minimum wage had typically been small. The kinds of workers that “Fight for $15” was looking to mobilize—most notably fast-food workers—have historically been difficult to organize, since they’re younger and often don’t stay in their jobs for long. And the goal of more than doubling the national minimum wage seemed outlandish.

“Fight for $15” doesn’t seem so quixotic anymore. Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles have now all approved a fifteen-dollar minimum. More than a dozen states have voted to increase their minimum wages by varying amounts, and both New York and California passed laws that will raise the minimum wage to, yes, fifteen dollars an hour, although not for several years. These victories emboldened the “Fight for $15” movement—in late November, it staged its twelfth national fast-food-worker strike, coupled with protests across the country.

These increases in local minimum wages are important in two ways. First, while higher wages are obviously an enormous boon to workers who have jobs (and not just minimum-wage jobs, since raising the minimum wage has a ripple effect on other wages as well), we have no real idea whether they will also make businesses less likely to hire new workers or keep the ones they have. A sizable body of economic research suggests that minimum-wage hikes do not have a significant impact on employment. But all of that work is about minimum-wage hikes that were relatively small. A fifteen-dollar minimum wage, by contrast, takes us into uncharted territory, which is why even liberal economists have often been leery about endorsing it. So the experience of cities like Seattle will tell us quite a bit about the impact of a much higher minimum wage. We'll see whether businesses end up passing along the costs to customers in the form of higher prices, invest more in automation that would reduce the need for cheap labor, cut hours, or simply see profits fall. And that, in turn, will help shape national policy going forward.