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This article examines the mid-twentieth-century transformation of U.K. pension fund investment policy known as the “cult of equity.” It focuses on the influence exercised by the Association of Superannuation and Pension Funds over actuarial and corporate governance standards, through actuaries who were members of its council. This intervention led to increasingly permissive actuarial valuations that reduced contributions for sponsors of pension funds investing in equities. Increased demand for equities required pension funds to adopt a more permissive approach to corporate governance than insurance companies and investment trusts, and contributed to declining standards of corporate governance.

Between February 8-11, 2016, selected artifacts from the Blackwater Draw National Historic Landmark (LA3324) were scanned in advance of a grant proposal to digitally aggregate the Clovis-era artifacts from the Clovis type site. These data were collected using a NextEngineHD running ScanStudioHD Pro, and were post-processed in Geomagic Design X 2016.0.1. All data associated with this project have been made publicly available (open access) and are accessible in Zenodo under a Creative Commons Attribution license, where they can be downloaded for use in additional projects and learning activities. These data have the capacity to augment a variety of research designs spanning the digital humanities, applications of geometric morphometrics, and many others. Additionally, these scans will augment a wide range of comparative research topics throughout the Americas and beyond. Reuse potential for these data is significant.

Rogue trading has been a persistent feature of international financial markets over the past thirty years, but there is remarkably little historical treatment of this phenomenon. To begin to fill this gap, evidence from company and official archives is used to expose the anatomy of a rogue trading scandal at Lloyds Bank International in 1974. The rush to internationalize, the conflict between rules and norms, and the failure of internal and external checks all contributed to the largest single loss of any British bank to that time. The analysis highlights the dangers of inconsistent norms and rules even when personal financial gain is not the main motive for fraud, and shows the important links between operational and market risk. This scandal had an important role in alerting the Bank of England and U.K. Treasury to gaps in prudential supervision at the end of the Bretton Woods pegged exchange-rate system.

Warren Buffett famously commented that the U.S. airline industry had made zero profit in its first nine decades. Subsequently, between the millennium and the Great Financial Crisis the airlines in total lost almost $60 billion. Yet no major airline was liquidated or taken over in those nine years. Financial support was repeatedly provided by GE, the conglomerate supplier of leasing finance, engines, and servicing. The article offers a historical perspective on the factors behind this relationship between GE and airlines. It outlines the benefits or costs to GE, airline shareholders, and passengers; the relevance of the model for other industries; and implications for different notions of efficiency.

While researchers have pointed to numerous methods of expanding state capacity in the Progressive Era, the literature has overlooked the creation of nominally private companies relying on implicit government guarantees, later known as government-sponsored enterprises. This article explains the novelty and structure of the nation's first such enterprises, the Federal Land Banks, and describes how their design embodied several fragilities that contributed to their collapse and bailout in 1932. The article then demonstrates why, despite these problems, the land banks became the model for subsequent enterprises and financial reforms.

Leaders of business schools and other educational institutions have enjoyed decades of stability. Today, we confront a set of systemic global challenges, including a pandemic, severe economic weakness, heightened inequality, racial injustice, and a climate emergency. Taken together, these challenges redefine the environment in which we operate—and offer us an opportunity to reimagine our organizations. We can learn about how to deal with this level of upheaval by studying how leading U.S. business schools responded to World War II. All shrank as students and faculty were drafted, most innovated in fairly traditional ways while still maintaining existing activities alongside of war-time innovations, and some pushed forward long-standing institutional change. One school choose a different path, shutting all peacetime programs as it fully committed not only to helping win a global war but, just as importantly, to forging a lasting peace—the long-term economic prosperity that followed the war. The lessons we can draw from academic leaders from nearly eighty years ago are apt today.