Appendix E — Fun Facts Compendium

A collection of historical, etymological, and curious facts about money, banking, credit, and finance — useful as conversation starters, lesson openers, or just as a reminder that almost every “normal” feature of the modern financial system has a specific, traceable, and often surprisingly recent origin. Where the popular version of a story is disputed or a famous quote can’t be confirmed, this says so plainly — checking the origin of a “fact” is, after all, part of the point. This is general education for a general audience in the United States, not advice; a few figures (especially the cost of making coins and credit-union totals) move over time, so treat those as approximate.

Money itself

“Salary” comes from salt — sort of. The English word salary descends from the Latin salarium, an allowance or stipend paid to Roman soldiers, and salarium is linguistically tied to sal (salt). Whether soldiers were actually paid in salt, given money specifically to buy it, or simply received a stipend that happened to carry a salt-related name is debated — no surviving ancient source settles it, and historians increasingly treat the “paid in salt” version as a colorful but unproven story. What’s not debated is the word’s descent from salarium.

A “buck” was a deerskin. The slang “buck” for a dollar is usually traced to the 1700s American frontier trade, when deerskins were a common unit of value in commerce between colonists and Indigenous peoples — a “buck” being a male deerskin. The term outlived the deerskin economy and attached itself to the dollar. (Like many slang etymologies, it’s widely accepted but not airtight.)

“Two bits.” The Spanish dollar (the peso de ocho, or “piece of eight”) circulated widely in colonial America — a large silver coin that could be physically cut into eight wedges, each a “bit.” So “two bits” was a quarter of a dollar, and the old cheer “two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar” is just counting in eighths.

Why coin edges are ridged. The grooves on the rims of dimes, quarters, and half-dollars — called “reeding” — began as a fraud-prevention device in the 1600s. When coins were made of precious metal, people would shave slivers off smooth edges and keep the shavings; reeded edges made shaving obvious at a glance. (Isaac Newton, as master of England’s Royal Mint, championed milled edges against coin-clipping in the 1690s.) Modern coins contain little or no precious metal, so the ridges now survive mostly by tradition.

The penny — which cost more than a penny, and is now being retired. For well over a decade the U.S. Mint lost money on every penny it produced; in recent years a penny cost roughly three to four cents to make (the nickel, too, has cost more than its face value). After decades of failed proposals to eliminate it, the Treasury finally stopped producing pennies for circulation in 2025, citing the cost; existing pennies remain legal tender, and the Mint still strikes limited quantities for collector sets.

Where the piggy bank came from (maybe). A popular story holds that in medieval England, “pygg” was a type of clay used for household pots and jars, that people kept coins in “pygg jars,” and that as the word faded potters began shaping the jars like actual pigs. It’s a charming explanation — but etymologists consider the pygg-clay link unproven folk etymology, so enjoy it as a story rather than a settled fact.

The largest U.S. bill ever made. The $100,000 bill, featuring Woodrow Wilson, was a Series 1934 gold certificate printed only in late 1934–early 1935 and used solely for transfers between Federal Reserve Banks — it never circulated publicly. The largest bill ever circulated for public use was the $10,000 note (last printed 1945). All denominations above $100 were officially discontinued in 1969, citing lack of public use (and concerns about their use in crime).

The “$" symbol. The most widely accepted explanation traces the dollar sign to the Spanish peso, abbreviated "ps" in 18th-century commerce; written quickly, the letters merged into the familiar "$” — and it was used for the Spanish dollar before the U.S. dollar existed. (Several rival theories exist; this is the leading one, not a proven one.)

Banking and credit

The world’s first stock exchange. The Dutch East India Company issued the first publicly traded shares in 1602, and the Amsterdam exchange that grew up to trade them is generally considered the world’s oldest. The shares let ordinary Dutch citizens invest in trading voyages without bearing the full risk of any single ship.

Wall Street is named after an actual wall. In 1653, Dutch settlers of New Amsterdam (later New York City) built a wooden palisade across lower Manhattan as a defensive barrier; the street that ran along it became Wall Street. The British demolished the wall in 1699, but the name stuck. The New York Stock Exchange traces its founding to the Buttonwood Agreement of 1792, signed by 24 brokers — by tradition, under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street.

“Bull” and “bear” markets. The most common explanation: a bull attacks by thrusting its horns upward (rising market), a bear swipes its paws downward (falling market). An older theory traces “bear” to the “bearskin jobbers” who sold bearskins they didn’t yet own, betting prices would fall before delivery. The animal metaphors were in use in London by the 18th century.

The first ATM. The first cash-dispensing machine was installed outside a Barclays Bank branch in Enfield, north London, on June 27, 1967. The team was led by John Shepherd-Barron, who said the idea came to him in the bath after he’d missed a bank’s Saturday hours. The first machines used mildly radioactive (carbon-14) paper vouchers matched to a four-digit PIN — and that’s why PINs are four digits, reportedly because that’s all Shepherd-Barron’s wife could reliably remember. (Who “invented the ATM” is genuinely disputed, but Barclays’ was the first installed.)

The first U.S. credit union. St. Mary’s Bank in Manchester, New Hampshire, founded in 1908, was the first credit union in the United States — organized by French-Canadian textile workers who couldn’t get banking services as immigrant laborers. Credit unions are now a roughly $2-trillion-plus industry serving on the order of 140 million Americans (an approximate, growing figure).

Truth in Lending was new in 1968. Before the Truth in Lending Act of 1968, lenders weren’t required to disclose APRs or total finance charges clearly, and people routinely signed credit agreements without knowing the real cost of borrowing. The standardized disclosure box on every credit agreement exists because consumers won the right to those numbers by federal law — within living memory. (See the Consumer-Rights Toolkit.)

The Federal Reserve is younger than the lightbulb. The U.S. Federal Reserve System was created by the Federal Reserve Act of December 23, 1913 — while the incandescent lightbulb was patented in 1879. For more than a century after independence the country had no central bank, an era marked by repeated banking panics (1873, 1884, 1890, 1893, and 1907); the 1907 panic directly motivated the Fed’s creation.

Famous bubbles, manias, and frauds

Tulip mania (1637). At the peak of the Dutch tulip-bulb craze, the rarest single bulbs reportedly traded for many times a skilled craftsman’s annual income before the crash in February 1637. It’s the original textbook asset bubble — though historians (notably Anne Goldgar) now think the economic devastation was far smaller than later popular accounts claimed. The cultural lesson outlasted the actual damage.

The South Sea Bubble (1720). The South Sea Company, granted a monopoly on British trade with South America, saw its share price balloon severalfold in 1720 (from roughly £128 to nearly £1,000) before collapsing. Isaac Newton lost heavily — commonly cited around £20,000, the equivalent of millions today — and recent scholarship confirms the once-doubted story was largely true. He’s famously said to have remarked, “I can calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people” — but the quote’s exact wording and origin are uncertain, surviving only through second-hand reports.

Charles Ponzi (1920). The “Ponzi scheme” — paying earlier investors with later investors’ money — is named for Charles Ponzi, an Italian immigrant in Boston who in 1920 promised 50% returns in 45 days through a scheme supposedly built on international postal-reply coupons. At its height he was reportedly taking in as much as a quarter-million dollars a day before it collapsed within months. The name has stuck for over a century.

Beanie Babies (1990s). The plush toys became a genuine speculative mania in the late 1990s, with collectors paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars for specific “retired” designs before the bubble collapsed entirely. Many people who bought “Princess Diana” Beanie Babies as a college fund later found them worth about as much as any other beanbag.

Bernie Madoff (2008). The largest Ponzi scheme in history. Madoff, a former NASDAQ chairman, ran a fund promising steady modest returns that were entirely fictional, paying old investors with new money. It unraveled in the 2008 crisis — roughly $65 billion in fabricated account value, and on the order of $17–19 billion in actual principal lost. Madoff died in prison in 2021.

U.S. tax-advantaged accounts

IRAs (1974). The Individual Retirement Account was created by the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) of 1974, originally for workers without an employer pension. The Roth IRA — named for its main sponsor, Senator William Roth of Delaware — came later, in the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997.

The 401(k) was an accident. Covered in Week 23. In short: a small provision (“paragraph k”) added to Section 401 of the tax code in 1978 was meant to clarify rules on executive deferred compensation; benefits consultant Ted Benna realized in 1980 that ordinary employees could use it to save pre-tax, and the first 401(k) plans launched in 1981. They now hold trillions of dollars.

The 529 plan. Named for Section 529 of the tax code, created in 1996 (as the Qualified Tuition Program). 529s offer tax-free growth and withdrawals for qualified education expenses, are state-sponsored (most states offer a tax deduction for contributing to the home-state plan), and have been broadened over the years from college-only to include K–12 tuition, apprenticeships, and student-loan repayment (with further expansions under the 2025 tax law). See the Major Life Events module.

HSAs are newer than you think. Health Savings Accounts were created by the Medicare Modernization Act of 2003 — barely two decades old. Despite their unusual triple tax advantage, most eligible people either don’t have one or treat it purely as a spending account rather than the long-term investment vehicle it can be (see Week 22).

The Saver’s Credit. A federal tax credit — on top of any deduction — for low-to-moderate-income people who contribute to retirement accounts, worth up to $1,000 ($2,000 for a married couple), created in 2001. It’s routinely missed because few preparers mention it (and it’s scheduled to become a government “Saver’s Match” in 2027 — see the Tax Season module).

Famous rules and ratios

The 4% rule. A widely cited retirement guideline: withdrawing roughly 4% of your initial portfolio in year one, then adjusting for inflation, historically gave a high probability of lasting at least 30 years. It comes from a 1994 study by financial planner William Bengen and was popularized by the “Trinity Study” (1998) by three Trinity University professors. It’s a guideline based on U.S. historical returns, not a guarantee — real outcomes hinge heavily on the sequence of returns in the early retirement years, and Bengen himself has since revised his “safe” figure upward.

The 50/30/20 budget. A popular framework: 50% of after-tax income to needs, 30% to wants, 20% to savings and debt repayment. It was popularized in the 2005 book All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan, co-authored by Elizabeth Warren (then a Harvard law professor, later a U.S. senator) and her daughter Amelia Warren Tyagi.

“Pay yourself first.” As a personal-finance maxim, it’s usually traced to George S. Clason’s 1926 book The Richest Man in Babylon, which teaches money principles as parables set in ancient Mesopotamia. It’s still in print nearly a century later and remains one of the best-selling personal-finance books ever.

The “compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world” quote. Attributed to Albert Einstein — but there is no credible evidence Einstein ever said it. The math is impressive without him; the misattribution is itself a tidy lesson in checking sources (see Week 26).

The rule of 72. A mental-math shortcut: divide 72 by an annual return rate to estimate the years for money to double (at 7%, 72 ÷ 7 ≈ 10 years). An early version of the rule appears in Luca Pacioli’s 1494 Summa de Arithmetica — the same work, by the Franciscan friar often called the “father of accounting,” that helped popularize double-entry bookkeeping.

“Buy when there is blood in the streets.” Often attributed to Baron Nathan Rothschild around the Battle of Waterloo (1815); the attribution is uncertain, though the contrarian principle is well established. Warren Buffett’s modern version — “Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful” — is one he’s expressed in his shareholder letters over the years (frequently dated to the 1980s) and is equally widely quoted.

Inflation, history, and changing values

What a 1913 dollar is worth now. One dollar in 1913 (the year the Fed was founded) had roughly the buying power of about $30 today — meaning $1,000 stuffed under a mattress in 1913 would, in real terms, be worth around $30 of purchasing power now. The same $1,000 invested in a broad U.S. stock index from 1913 would, by contrast, have grown to a very large sum (on the order of tens of millions of dollars) — a vivid illustration of both inflation’s slow erosion of cash and the long-run power of compounding. (The investment figure is an approximate, illustrative long-run estimate.)

The gold standard ended in 1971. The U.S. dollar was tied to gold from 1879 (with interruptions during wars and the Depression). On August 15, 1971, President Nixon ended the dollar’s convertibility into gold for international transactions — the “Nixon shock.” Since then the dollar has been a pure fiat currency, backed by the U.S. government rather than any commodity.

Bretton Woods (1944–1971). Near the end of World War II, delegates from 44 nations met at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, and built an international monetary system pegging other currencies to the dollar and the dollar to gold. It lasted until the 1971 Nixon shock, and the same conference created the International Monetary Fund and what became the World Bank.

Glass-Steagall and its repeal. The Banking Act of 1933 (Glass-Steagall) separated commercial banking from investment banking after the 1929 crash. The separation lasted 66 years, until the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 repealed most of it, letting commercial banking, investment banking, and insurance combine under one roof. Some economists link the later consolidation to the 2008 crisis; others dispute the connection.

The CFPB is new. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010 after the 2008 crisis — the youngest of the major federal financial regulators. Much of the consumer-protection machinery referenced throughout this course (clearer mortgage disclosures, the public complaint portal, and more) runs through it, and its existence has been politically contested since day one.

Insurance and risk

Lloyd’s of London started in a coffee house. Covered in Week 20. In 1688, ship owners, merchants, and sailors began meeting at Edward Lloyd’s coffee house in London to share shipping news and arrange insurance for cargoes; the informal network grew into Lloyd’s of London, still one of the world’s most famous insurance markets more than 330 years later.

Ancient Babylonian risk-sharing. The Code of Hammurabi (around 1750 BCE) included rules on “bottomry”: a merchant could borrow against a shipment, and the loan was forgiven if the ship was lost at sea — the lender charging more to bear that risk. That’s functionally insurance, written into law nearly 3,700 years before the modern industry.

Whole life insurance is mostly about commissions. A point widely made in consumer-protection writing: whole life policies often pay the selling agent a commission equal to much of the first year’s premium — part of why agents can be so enthusiastic about policies that, for most ordinary households, are far more expensive and less suitable than term life. The economics generally favor the issuer and the agent over the buyer (see Week 21).

Behavioral economics and money psychology

Loss aversion. In their 1979 paper introducing Prospect Theory, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that people feel losses roughly twice as intensely as equivalent gains — losing $100 hurts about twice as much as winning $100 feels good. That single asymmetry explains an enormous amount of financial behavior: clinging to losing investments, excessive caution about investing at all, and why “don’t lose X” marketing beats “gain X.” Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for this body of work (Tversky had died in 1996).

Anchoring. When people make a numerical estimate, they latch onto the first number they encounter — even an obviously irrelevant one. In a now-famous experiment, participants who had just written down the last two digits of their Social Security number gave systematically higher or lower estimates for the value of unrelated objects depending on whether those digits were high or low. It’s why a “list price” anchors a negotiation, why “compare at $X” tags work, and why the first number named in a salary talk matters so much.

Hedonic adaptation. A repeatedly confirmed finding from happiness research: people adapt to most positive changes — a new house, a new car, a raise — within months, drifting back toward their prior baseline. This is the engine of “lifestyle inflation”: the new thing thrills for a few weeks, becomes normal, and a different new thing is needed to recreate the feeling. Spending on experiences, relationships, and time appears to resist this treadmill better than spending on material goods.

Mental accounting. People treat money differently depending on where it came from — a tax refund “feels like” fun money even though it was your own earnings all along, and unexpected windfalls get spent faster than money earned. Economist Richard Thaler, who won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics, documented dozens of these patterns under the name “mental accounting.” Noticing your own is one of the simplest financial upgrades available.

A closing reminder

Every fact here shares a feature: each looks like a fixed, timeless part of how money works, and almost none of it is. The dollar sign, the 401(k), the credit score, the diamond engagement ring, the right to dispute an item on your credit report, the ability to file your taxes without paying a private company — each has a specific origin, often within living memory, and each could have been otherwise.

That’s the underlying point of this whole course. The financial system is built. Some of it was built well, some of it was built deliberately to confuse you, and some of it was built by accident — and knowing which is which is most of what financial literacy actually is.

Educational disclaimer: This page provides general financial education for a general audience in the United States. It is a collection of historical and curious facts, not financial, legal, or tax advice. A few figures here (the cost of minting coins, credit-union totals, inflation conversions, and long-run investment illustrations) change over time or are approximate, and several popular stories and quotes are flagged as disputed or unconfirmed. Verify any specific figure at a primary source before relying on it. Date-sensitive items were verified against authoritative sources as of June 2026.