The city was rebuilt, but people and commerce headed south to Los Angeles, which grew significantly in the decade following the earthquake — because of that earthquake.
"It's really meant to be neutral with respect to the financials of Walmart, with all the benefit being passed on to the customer," notes Walmart's e-commerce head Marc Lore, previously founder of Jet.com.
In '35 Lie was appointed Minister of Justice, in '39, Minister of Commerce & head of the Ministry & Shipping Supply.
During the 1927 flood, President Calvin Coolidge designated Herbert Hoover, his Secretary of Commerce, to head flood-relief efforts, declining to get personally involved or even to visit the flood zone despite a national clamor that he do so.
Jones, a one-time Texas banker and businessman who was FDR's secretary of commerce and head of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), which controlled the purse strings for purchasing wartime supplies.
Now, at a commerce committee headed by Senator Ernest F. Hollings, Democrat of South Carolina, who opposes the bill, it is considered a non-starter.
I reported in an earlier column the story of Utimco, the University of Texas fund that, while Mr. Bush was governor and the current secretary of commerce, Donald Evans, headed the U.T. regents, placed more than $1 billion with private funds, many with close business or political ties to Mr. Bush himself.
Southeast Asia's mobile commerce is headed in the same direction.
At cocktail parties, business conferences, even in my own office, my mutterings that these wild valuations couldn't stand, and that e-commerce was headed for a crash, were met with pity and shaking heads.
