Treasure: "The history of US finance in one very, very long chart"

I was almost tempted to put the symbols of the first twelve stocks in Charlie Dow's average in the headline but what with all the mergers and comings-and-goings etc. the only one still in the index is GE and the only other symbols I remember are NL (formerly National Lead now NL Industries) and LG (formerly Laclede Gas, now Laclede Group).

I do remember there was a big ethanol company in the original dozen and maybe cotton.

And why, gentle reader may ask warily, was I traipsing down memory lane?

Because the denizens of Alphaville have caused us to break one of our rules, i.e. avoid linking to the same site more than once per day (unless they have something really, really good).
As you can see it's not a hard and fast rule.
Here's Alphaville:

PowerPoint smackdown.

We popped this in further further reading but it’s cool and weekend-friendly enough to warrant a short Friday post. (You may have seen this before but we hadn’t, so please indulge this geekery.)

The NY Fed’s Liberty Street Economics blog on Friday flagged an epic testimony to graphic design and American financial history. It’s a looooooong chart showing what happened in the US economy between 1861 and 1938, painstakingly drawn by L. Merle Hostetler, former director of research of the Cleveland Fed....MORE

Treasure.

If you really must have a PowerPoint fix here's Abraham Lincoln's PowerPoint presentation of the Gettysburg Address doing the bullet point thing:

11/19/1863

And now please welcome President Abraham Lincoln.
Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7?
No, that's not right. Hmmm.
Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute.

Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president. While we're waiting, I want to thank Judge David Wills, chairman of the committee supervising the dedication of the Gettysburg cemetery. It's great to be here, Dave, and you and the committee are doing a great job. Gee, sometimes this new technology does have glitches, but we couldn't live without it, could we? Oh - is it ready? OK, here we go:

 From slide 4:

Review of Key Objectives & Critical Success Factors

-What Makes Nation Unique?

• -Conceived in Liberty
• -Men are Equal

-Shared vision

• -New Birth of Freedom
• -Gov't of/by/for the people

And slide 6:

Summary

• New Nation
• Civil War
• Dedicate Field
• Dedicated to unfinished work
• New Birth of Freedom
• Government not perish