Black Monday
Excerpts from "the first rough draft of history" as reported in The Washington Post on this date in the 20th century.</br></br>The stock market crash of Black Monday, 1987, was in many ways the nation's gravest financial crisis since the Great Depression. But the Federal Reserve's decisive moves to pump money into the banking system and cut interest rates averted a recession. In fact, the stock market soon recovered and the economy kept growing. An excerpt from the Post of Oct. 20, 1987:</br></br>The stock market was devastated by the worst one-day collapse in history yesterday in a pandemonium of panic selling that shattered all records and swamped stock exchanges around the country and overseas.</br></br>The best-known market barometer -- the Dow Jones average of 30 industrial stocks -- plummeted 508 points, five times the previous record set last Friday. The Dow closed at 1738, dropping 22.6 percent, or nearly double the 12.8 percent plunge of Oct. 28, 1929, the crash that began the Great Depression.</br></br>More than 604 million shares were traded on the New York Stock Exchange and 239 million on the American and over-the-counter markets, shattering previous records.