5 of the World’s Most Devastating Financial Crises

The Financial Crisis of 2007–08

This sparked the Great Recession, the most-severe financial crisis since the Great Depression, and it wreaked havoc in financial markets around the world. Triggered by the collapse of the housing bubble in the U.S., the crisis resulted in the collapse of Lehman Brothers (one of the biggest investment banks in the world), brought many key financial institutions and businesses to the brink of collapse, and required government bailouts of unprecedented proportions. It took almost a decade for things to return to normal, wiping away millions of jobs and billions of dollars of income along the way.

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9 Mysterious Disappearances of People Other Than Amelia Earhart
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BY Naomi Blumberg
It turns out that a number of people throughout history have mysteriously disappeared. Some were famous when they went missing and became even more legendary afterward, and some reached celebrity status simply because they disappeared. Here are nine strange tales of people (aside from Amelia Earhart) whose disappearances still haunt us today.

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  Al-Hakim
  

Al-Hakim was a 10th–11th-century ruler of the Fatimid dynasty who was known for his erratic and contradictory leadership. He led for 25 years (996–1021) of his known 36 years of life, during which time he, for instance, established a generous policy to support the poor only to follow it with some astonishingly harsh or strange edict such as forbidding women to leave their homes and then forbidding cobblers to make or sell women’s footwear. One night in February 1021 al-Hakim rode out of Cairo. He was never heard from again, nor was his body ever found.

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  Edward V of England
  

Edward V, Edward IV, and Elizabeth Woodville
Edward V (lower right) with his father, Edward IV, and mother, Elizabeth Woodville, illumination from Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, 1477; in Lambeth Palace Library, London.
Courtesy of the Lambeth Palace Library; photograph, Royal Academy of Arts
The eldest son of King Edward IV and Elizabeth Woodville was born while his father was abroad in Holland. When Edward IV returned to his royal position, he named his son the prince of Wales. But upon the king’s death, a dispute erupted between the child’s maternal and paternal uncles concerning the legitimacy of the king’s marriage to Elizabeth. Ultimately, Edward V and his brother Richard, duke of York, were locked away in the Tower of London. It is presumed that they were murdered and that skeletons found in the tower in 1647 were those of the boys.

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