Portal:Business/Did you know/4

• ...that William McChesney Martin, Jr. (pictured) was the longest-serving Chairman of the Federal Reserve serving from April 2, 1951 to January 31, 1970?

• ...that eleven of the twenty-nine winners of the John Bates Clark Medal, a biannual award given out by the American Economic Association, have gone on to later win the Nobel Prize in Economics?

• ...that Ingvar Kamprad, founder of the home furnishing retail chain store IKEA, drew some controversy in 1994 when it was revealed that Kamprad had joined Swedish fascist activist Per Engdahl's pro-Nazi group in 1942?

• ...that, according to historical legend, Laissez-faire stems from a meeting in about 1681 between the powerful French finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert and a group of French businessmen led by a certain M. Le Gendre?

• ...that Ransom E. Olds used the assembly line system to produce automobiles in 1901 before Henry Ford?

• ...that Antoine Augustin Cournot derived the first formula for the rule of supply and demand as a function of price and in fact was the first to draw supply and demand curves on a graph in his Researches on the Mathematical Principles of the Theory of Wealth?

• ...that the Toyota Production System (TPS) developed by Toyota, that comprises its management philosophy and practices, organizes manufacturing and logistics for the automobile manufacturer, including interaction with suppliers and customers?