Learn Finance 101

In this episode we turn our full attention to one single, legendary event that has haunted financial history for nearly four centuries: Tulip Mania, or Tulpenmanie, in the Dutch Republic during the winter of 1636–1637.

The financial exchange landscape of early 2026 looks nothing like the world we left at the end of the 20th century. Total global equity market capitalization sits somewhere between 120 and 130 trillion U.S. dollars according to the most recent World Federation of Exchanges and SIFMA aggregates. The forex market turns over roughly 9.6 trillion dollars per day on average - a number captured in the 2025 BIS Triennial Survey that came out last September and still feels almost surreal when you say it out loud. Cryptocurrency spot and derivatives trading adds hundreds of billions more in daily notional value on regulated and decentralized platforms combined.

In this episode we will focus on a massive push to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., creating jobs, securing supply chains, and rebuilding our industrial base. It's not hype, the Reshoring Initiative's latest data shows trends holding strong into late 2025, with high-tech sectors leading the charge.

In this episode we are going to have honest chat about why defense is one of the purest de-globalization plays, what’s driving the boom, how the big primes and smaller players performed in 2025, the challenges we shouldn’t ignore, and where the opportunities might be heading into 2026 and beyond.

This is going to be a long episode, we're aiming for a comprehensive chat, like sitting around a campfire recounting legends. So grab your coffee, tea, or whatever fuels your curiosity, settle in, and let's rewind the clock. By the end, you'll have a full grasp of how a bunch of internet strangers turned the financial world upside down, and why echoes of that mania still ripple through today's markets.