bank secrets

[Jester]

The History channel did a show on him and they mentioned that he was very highly involved in the Opium trade, such that they labelled him the wealthiest drug smuggler of all time. I can't remember the exact title of the show, but it was one of the series that they did on industrial magnets (they also covered Carnegie, Morgan Stanley, and someone else on that episode). The group that produced the episode dug really deep to get information on all of the people involved (and part of the reason I question Rockfeller beating Carnegie as the producers showed that Carnegie had a 10s of millions more than what was listed when he sold American Steel to Morgan Stanely and his group of investors, something along the lines that he was closer to 550 Million to 600 Million when he switched to Philantropy and somewhere in the neighborhood of 350 to 360 Billion adjusted by inflation). If there is one thing the History channel does right, they dig and dig and dig for information and I think Wikipedia may not have all the information that the Histoy Channel has dug up on some of these subjects.

1) I think you mean industrial 'magnates'. A program on industrial magnets might be interesting, but it would be rather different.;)

2) The problem is likely in the construction of the index for inflation. This is not even close to a trivial problem; you cannot just go back and look at an abstract number and multiply it out through the years. You have to construct a basket of goods, figure out its equivalent throughout the years, etc, etc... and then use that to gauge inflation. Index number problems bedevil even the best economic historians, and there is no right answer. So, comparing "inflation adjusted" wealth across studies is probably a meaningless activity unless you normalized them somehow.

-Jester