COMPLETE ORIGINAL NEWSPAPER, the NY Times dated Oct 20, 1987. (My personal Collection )

Front page headline: “STOCKS PLUNGE 508 POINTS, A Drop of 22.6 %; 604 Million Volume Nearly Doubles Record.”  This is the iconic NY Times with banner headline news coverage of the 1987 Stock Market Crash, known as the Black Monday Crash !! There is a prominent front page chart of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1982 through 1987, showing the precipitous drop on Oct 19, 1987 !!

The Black Monday decline was the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history and the NY Times was THE newspaper to have with this financial disaster event !!

In finance, Black Monday refers to Monday, October 19, 1987, when stock markets around the world crashed, shedding a huge value in a very short time. The crash began in Hong Kong, spread west through international time zones to Europe, hitting the United States after other markets had already declined by a significant margin. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) dropped by 508 points to 1738.74 (22.61%). By the end of October, stock markets in Hong Kong had fallen 45.8%, Australia 41.8%, Spain 31%, the United Kingdom 26.4%, the United States 22.68%, and Canada 22.5%. New Zealand’s market was hit especially hard, falling about 60% from its 1987 peak, and taking several years to recover. (The terms Black Monday and Black Tuesday are also applied to October 28 and 29, 1929, which occurred after Black Thursday on October 24, which started the Stock Market Crash of 1929. In Australia and New Zealand the 1987 crash is also referred to as Black Tuesday because of the timezone difference.)

The Black Monday decline was the largest one-day percentage decline in stock market history. Other large declines have occurred after periods of market closure, such as, in the USA, on Monday, September 17, 2001, the first day that the US market was open following the September 11, 2001 attacks. (Saturday, December 12, 1914, is sometimes erroneously cited as the largest one-day percentage decline of the DJIA. In reality, the ostensible decline of 24.39% was created retroactively by a redefinition of the DJIA in 1916.)

Interestingly, the DJIA was positive for the 1987 calendar year. It opened on January 2, 1987, at 1,897 points and would close on December 31, 1987, at 1,939 points. The DJIA did not regain its August 25, 1987 closing high of 2,722 points until almost two years later.

A degree of mystery is associated with the 1987 crash, and it has been labeled as a black swan event. Important assumptions concerning human rationality, the efficient market hypothesis, and economic equilibrium were brought into question by the event. Debate as to the cause of the crash still continues many years after the event, with no firm conclusions reached.

In the wake of the crash, markets around the world were put on restricted trading primarily because sorting out the orders that had come in was beyond the computer technology of the time. This also gave the Federal Reserve and other central banks time to pump liquidity into the system to prevent a further downdraft. While pessimism reigned, the DJIA bottomed on October 20.

Following the stock market crash, a group of 33 eminent economists from various nations met in Washington, D.C. in December 1987, and collectively predicted that “the next few years could be the most troubled since the 1930s.”