Biggest Events of the Millennium

Someone on a social media site recently challenged me to produce a short list of the biggest historical events since 2000.

I took her to mean "since 2000 inclusive." And to keep the list respectably short, I've limited myself to one Big Event from each year.

After a little thought, I came up with the following, which as you can see I'm reproducing here. I considered invoking an event in the world of baseball for the Big Event of 2004, but thought better of it. (New Englanders will know what I had in mind.)

2000: The world is devastated on January 1st by the consequences of the Y2K bug ... uh, never mind. The refutation "ambulando" of the Y2K doomsayers serves as evidence that the digital world is more resilient than it had been in the fears of some and the (semi-secret) hopes of other.

2001: Al Qaeda attacks US targets in Virginia and New York, kills thousands.

2002: The new “euro” notes and coins are introduced as circulating currency in much of Europe.

2003: The overthrow of Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq.

2004: Ten new countries join the EU in the largest expansion in the Union's history, creating the globe's largest free trade zone.

2005: Angela Merkel assumes office as the Chancellor of Germany.

2006: Google bought YouTube for what seemed a massive amount of money $1.65 billion. (Given the subsequent growth of video streaming, that number nowadays looks reasonable.)

2007: Apple brings out the first iPhone. Until this point, Blackberry, aka Research in Motion, dominated the smart phone market. That would not long remain the case.

2008: Huge New York financial institutions fail, esp Bear Stearns in the spring, Lehman Brothers in September, as the value of whole classes of real estate derivatives disappears.

2009: In June of this year, Bernie Madoff is sentenced to 150 years in prison for running an epic ponzi scheme.

2010: An explosion on the Deep Horizon platform in the Gulf of Mexico results in an unprecedentedly voluminous spill of crude oil into ocean water.

2011: A revolution in Libya, with outside assistance, topples the government of Muammar Gaddafi. Gaddafi himself is killed in October.

2012: Militant groups in Libya attack a US consulate in Benghazi. A US ambassador and three other Americans die in the attack. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will receive a good deal of opprobrium in connection with these deaths, which may be what has kept her from the Oval Office.

2013: In an ever-morphing Eurozone debt crisis, the EC warns Spain and Italy that their budgets have gotten way out of line; austerity is required.

2014: Scotland votes to remain part of the UK.

2015: Iran reaches an agreement with several world powers that had sanctioned it over its nuclear program.

2016: UK votes to leave the EU, that is, to “Brexit.”

2017: The People's Republic of China moves on both the fiscal and the diplomatic fronts to advance the cause of an updated Silk Road, tying its commerce to that of the Middle East and East Africa.

2018: The United States takes hemp, and CBD oil derived from hemp, off of its "Schedule I," the list of drugs supposedly void of any legitimate medicinal use. This happens without a lot of fanfare and pursuant to a Farm Bill. May be a turning-of-the-tide moment.

NB: In my month by month list of big finance industry events this past year, I neglected even to mention the de-scheduling of hemp. So I've covered my bets a bit by invoking it here! If I had to reconcile the two lists, I could of course say that the legalization of hemp this year was not a "financial" story in the sense I had in mind in composing the previous list. But the issue of how one would define the phrase so as to make that distinction work is an intricate one, and not at all worth a lot of time.

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