October 29 in business history: a $12.50 pen, two closed days on Wall Street, and 17.86 million births
Three 29 October decisions — a $12.50 ballpoint at Gimbels in 1945, a second closed day on Wall Street in 2012, and the end of China's one-child rule in 2015 — each read the constraint of the day correctly and misjudged what would remain once it was gone.
Three 29 Octobers were decided on a constraint that was about to come off.
A pen sold for $12.50 in New York in 1945 because the only factory making it had been running for a few weeks. An exchange stayed shut for a second day in 2012 because the market was a building in lower Manhattan. A party meeting in Beijing lifted a rule in 2015 that it believed was holding births down.
Each decision read the constraint in front of it correctly. Each misjudged what would remain once the constraint was gone.
The price of a pen, and what a patent is worth
On 29 October 1945, Gimbels put a ballpoint pen on sale in Manhattan: the Reynolds Rocket, the first one sold commercially in the United States. 1
Milton Reynolds had seen the pen in a Buenos Aires shop that year and brought one home. He rebuilt the ink feed to run on gravity, which sidestepped the capillary design at the heart of the Biro patent. 2
About 5,000 people came through the doors on the first day and bought $125,000 worth, which at that price is 10,000 pens. 2
By the end of that week 30,000 had gone over the counter, and another 12,000 by mail order. 2
The advertising promised two years of writing from one fill, at 20,000 feet, under water. The pens leaked, skipped and sometimes lost the ball bearing. 1
In the first eight months, 104,643 came back as defective. 1
The price held while the queues did. Reynolds cleared $541,000 after tax by the end of November, and 5.3 million pens had sold within three months. 2
Discounting began within six months. By the spring of 1946 about 100 American manufacturers were in the trade, and Macy's and Gimbels were selling Rockets for as little as $1. 2
By 1947 one cost 98 cents at Macy's, and 68,000 went in a single day at that price. 1
The company that kept the market came from Clichy. Marcel Bich launched the Cristal in France in 1950, took the business into North America in 1958, and by 1959 was selling the pen in the United States for 29 cents. 34
The premium lived in the queue, and the queue lasted about six months.
Decision mirror: On 28 April 2026, Health Canada authorized a generic semaglutide injection, the first generic version of the drug approved anywhere in the G7. 5
The opening came from an unpaid bill. Novo Nordisk let Canadian patent CA 2601784 lapse in 2019 over a maintenance fee of 250 Canadian dollars, about 188 American dollars at the time. 6
Ozempic sold 2.9 billion dollars' worth in Canada in 2025, more than three times the next drug on the list. 6
The American compound patent runs to 2032, and eight more generic submissions sit with the regulator. 56
Health Canada says many generic drugs in the country run 45 to 90 per cent below the brand price. 5
A drug's premium is a legal arrangement with a renewal date, and the register holding that date is public.
The two days the exchange stayed shut
Sandy came ashore near Brigantine, New Jersey, at about 7:30 on the evening of 29 October 2012, as a post-tropical cyclone with 70-knot winds. 7
The exchanges had closed that morning. On the afternoon of the 29th they extended the shutdown to a second session, the first two-day weather closure since the blizzard of 1888. 8
The last full-day weather closure had been Hurricane Gloria, on 27 September 1985. 9
Index futures stopped at 9:15 that morning, the CME shut its interest-rate floor at noon, and SIFMA recommended a noon close for dollar-denominated bonds. 8
Closing the floor and closing the market were two decisions. The NYSE had planned to keep trading electronically while its floors stayed shut; banks and brokerages objected that the plan was too complex and would put staff on the road into the storm. 10
So everything stopped. "It doesn't make sense to put people in harm's way or to only have half a market," said Nicholas Colas of ConvergEx. 8
Sandy killed at least 147 people around the Atlantic basin, 72 of them in the mid-Atlantic and northeastern United States. 7
The Hurricane Center's preliminary estimate of damage in the United States was near $50 billion. 7
Trading resumed on Wednesday 31 October, and the Dow ended the day about 10 points lower. 10
The floor was the market for as long as everyone had to be in the same room.
Decision mirror: From 6 December 2026, Nasdaq and NYSE Arca expect to trade 23 hours a day, five days a week. 11
The SEC approved Nasdaq's proposal on 10 April 2026, and NYSE Arca filed its operating framework on 12 May. 11
A new overnight session will run from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. ET, Sunday to Thursday, with a one-hour pause each evening for maintenance and corporate actions. 11
Fourteen years after a storm shut the market because the market was a place, the trading day becomes a convention written into rulebooks. Skadden's advice to issuers is a drafting note: "trading day", "market close" and volume-weighted average price all assume a bell. 11
The rule that ended and the births that kept falling
On 29 October 2015, the final day of the Communist Party's fifth plenum, Xinhua carried the Central Committee's decision that every couple could have two children. 12
The policy had run nationally since 1979 and is estimated to have prevented about 400 million births. 12
The first year looked like proof. Births reached 17.86 million in 2016, up 7.9 per cent and the highest since 2000, and more than 45 per cent of those babies had an older sibling. 13
The health commission's Yang Wenzhuang called the adjustment "extremely timely and extremely effective". 13
In January 2017 the same commission expected between 17 and 20 million births a year by 2020. 13
Its own statistics bureau counted 18.46 million for 2016 by sample survey, against the commission's 17.86 million: two tallies, one direction. 13
Births were 9.54 million in 2024 and 7.92 million in 2025, down 17 per cent and the lowest since records began in 1949. 14
The population fell by 3.39 million to 1.4049 billion. 14
Decision mirror: Beijing replaced the rule with money. The program launched in July 2025 pays 3,600 yuan a year, tax free, for each child under three, against 90 billion yuan budgeted from the central budget for that year. 15
It reached more than 24 million people, about 80 per cent of 2025 payments went out, and a second application round opened on 5 January 2026. 15
Markets keep reading policy as the binding constraint. After Hohhot announced its own child subsidies in March 2025, a basket of Chinese dairy and infant-formula shares rose more than 7 per cent in a few days. 16
The subsidy arrived, and so did 7.92 million births.
Three questions for the day
- Which price in your plan rests on a shortage with a delivery date, and who is watching that date?
- Which clause in your contracts assumes a market that opens and closes at a fixed hour?
- Which of your forecasts is really a forecast about a policy, and what does it become if behaviour holds after the policy changes?
References
- 1Today in History — October 29: The Ballpoint Pen Arrives
britannica.com
- 2Vintage Tech: The Ballpoint Pen
thebeliever.net
- 3Our Story
corporate.bic.com
- 4Bic Cristal
en.wikipedia.org
- 5
- 6Canada approves generic semaglutide from Dr. Reddy's
drugdiscoverytrends.com
- 7Tropical Cyclone Report: Hurricane Sandy
nhc.noaa.gov
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11NYSE Arca and Nasdaq to Launch Extended Trading
corpgov.law.harvard.edu
- 12
- 13
- 14
- 15
- 16Chinese measures to raise birth rates are boosting dairy stocks
goldmansachs.com
This story was produced automatically by a channel. One sentence is all it takes for Neodrop to keep producing for you.