The $30 Million Lesson Hidden Inside This Crypto Bear Market

My wife and I were in St. Paul last month. She found a self-guided house tour online. $15 per person. We figured, why not.

I didn’t even know whose house it was until we walked through the front door.

It belonged to James J. Hill, the man who built the Great Northern Railway.

The house was enormous. 36,500 square feet. 13 bathrooms. 22 fireplaces. A three-story pipe organ with more than 1,000 pipes.

The final bill came to $931,275 in 1891. That covered the house, the furnishings, and the landscaping across three acres. In today’s money, that’s north of $30 million.

But the size of the house isn’t what stuck with me. It was how Hill made the money to build it.

He didn’t get rich buying into a railroad boom. He bought a nearly bankrupt railroad after the bubble had already burst.

In 1878, Hill and a handful of partners bought the St. Paul and Pacific Railroad. It was nearly bankrupt, sitting in the wreckage of the Panic of 1873, a financial collapse that had already taken down more than 100 banks and gutted railroad stocks across the country.

Then he rebuilt it slowly, one profitable stretch of track at a time. He kept tighter control of his borrowing than most of his competitors, and he expanded only after the existing line could support the next stage.

On January 6, 1893, he finished it, a true transcontinental line running from St. Paul to Seattle. It was renamed the Great Northern Railway.

By that spring, the Panic of 1893 hit. It became one of the worst depressions in U.S. history. Railroads collapsed by the dozens. Hill’s own workers went on strike over pay cuts he’d been forced to make just to keep the railroad running.

Yet, the Great Northern survived. And it stayed one of the strongest railroads in the country for decades, overcoming several more boom and bust cycles.

As I walked through Hill’s house, I kept thinking about what that means for the crypto market today.

Panics Punish the People Who Can’t Wait