In a rare Saturday evening press conference, Fed Chairman Paul Volcker hiked the discount rate a full point to 12% and announced the Fed would stop targeting interest rates and instead clamp down on the money supply, letting rates go wherever they needed to. With CPI inflation running above 13%, the shock sent bond yields soaring and pushed the prime rate past 21% by late 1980. The medicine triggered two recessions, but inflation was back near 3% by 1983 — the template every central banker still cites for restoring credibility.

Egyptian and Syrian forces launched a coordinated surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, crossing the Suez Canal and storming the Golan Heights. Israel recovered and pushed back within weeks, but the war's real shock hit markets: on October 17, Arab OPEC members imposed an oil embargo on the U.S. and its allies. Crude roughly quadrupled to about $12 a barrel by early 1974, fueling stagflation and deepening the 1973-74 bear market that cut the S&P 500 nearly in half.

John and Simeon Reno boarded an Ohio & Mississippi Railroad train near Seymour, Indiana, broke into the Adams Express Company car and escaped with roughly $13,000 — widely considered the first peacetime train robbery in U.S. history. The heist spawned a wave of copycats across the West and pushed express companies to hire the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, which eventually tracked down the gang. It was an early lesson in the security costs of moving cash across a fast-growing rail network.

Fresh off a third straight championship with the Chicago Bulls and just months after the murder of his father, 30-year-old Michael Jordan announced his retirement at the team's practice facility, saying he had nothing left to prove. Within months he signed with the Chicago White Sox and spent 1994 hitting .202 for the Double-A Birmingham Barons. He returned to the NBA in March 1995 with a two-word fax — "I'm back" — and won three more titles, while the Air Jordan line grew into a multibillion-dollar business for Nike.

Warner Bros. premiered "The Jazz Singer" at its Warner Theatre on Broadway, starring Al Jolson and featuring synchronized singing and spoken dialogue via the Vitaphone sound-on-disc system — including the line "Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothin' yet!" The film was a high-stakes bet for a then-struggling studio, and producer Sam Warner died the day before the premiere. It became a box-office smash, lifting Warner Bros. into the ranks of the major studios and ending the silent film era within a few years.