But they had miscounted now many shares were out there, somehow, and the short sellers had no problem buying elsewhere. Everyone figured out what the Heinzes were doing and started dumping the stock. The price collapsed 85 percent, down to $10 a share. Heinze's brokerage house immediately went bankrupt, and that wound up being to the collapse of 1907 what Lehman Brothers was to the collapse of 2008.

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The resulting chain reaction of disaster would be called the Panic of 1907, and the New York Stock Exchange plummeted to 50 percent of what it had been the previous year (basically, imagine if today the stock market fell by 6,000 points). Banks and businesses across the country started going belly-up by the dozen.



And that was the last time one man's greed ever crashed the economy.

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Thanks in part to Augustus, the government saw fit to create the Federal Reserve in an effort to keep this sort of thing from happening in the future. Which, depending on how much Ayn Rand you've read, is either the savior of our economy or Satan himself.

For more ways we keep boning everything up for ourselves, check out 6 Natural Disasters That Were Caused by Human Stupidity and 6 Man-Made Natural Disasters Just Waiting to Happen.

And stop by LinkSTORM to discover which one of you screwed the Internet up for all of us.

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