The Week’s Best Business Longreads: Business Beast’s Picks for Dec. 23, 2012

Meet The Entrepreneur Behind The Apocalypse's Must-Have Accessory
Chadwick Matlin, BuzzFeed

How did Tim Ralston become America’s most famous “prepper”? He built the ultimate end-of-civilization tool: a weaponized shovel.



The Full Story Of How Facebook IPO Buyers Got Screwed
Henry Blodget, Business Insider

When Facebook was shopping its IPO, it realized that its earnings might not be as good as they expected. Who did the company tell? Only a few big-time investors



The Bribery Aisle: How Walmart Got Its Way in Mexico
David Barstow and Alejanda Xaniv von Bertrab, The New York Times

Mexico is one of the fastest growing middle-income countries in the world. Walmart needed to expand there fast. And so it resorted to systematic bribes.



The King of Con-men

The Economist



You think that Argentina does badly with its sovereign debt? It’s nothing compared to Poyais, the small Latin American country that defaulted on its debt in the 1820s. Why? It was the invention of a Scotsman named Gregor MacGregor.



How Fred Gaudelli Turned NBC’s Sunday Night Football Into The No. 1 Show On TV
John Koblin, Deadspin



The inside story of how “football night in America” moved from Monday to Sunday. 



God Save The British Economy
Adam Davidson, New York Times Magazine

An American economist went to the U.K. to be a senior policymaker at the Bank of England. Now, he speaks out about what his bosses from Threadneedle Street to Downing Street got wrong.