The financial market first started over 500 years ago with merchants trading debts.

although the Japanese government never believed it could defeat the United States, it did intend to negotiate an end to the war on favorable terms. ... It hoped that by attacking the fleet at Pearl Harbor it could delay American intervention, gaining time to solidify its Asian empire. By the fall of 1941, according to the revisionists, American policy makers had concluded that Japan would attack the U.S. fleet in Hawaii in the belief that the United States would then seek a settlement in the Pacific, thereby freeing Japan to create an East Asian “co-prosperity sphere.”