Good morning from Virginia.🇺🇸 It was a bright October morning in 1987, the kind of day when the leaves had turned and the air carried the first real bite of autumn. On the floor of the New York Stock Exchange the usual roar of trading was already building when the opening bell sounded. Within minutes the familiar noise turned into something else entirely—a continuous, rising clamor as sell orders poured in from every corner of the country and from markets that had already closed, or were closing, across the oceans. The Dow Jones Industrial Average had closed the previous Friday at 2,246.74. By the time the final bell rang that Monday it stood at 1,738.74. The loss was 508 points, 22.6 percent of the index’s value, the largest one-day percentage decline the Dow had ever suffered. More than 600 million shares changed hands, a volume that strained the capacity of the exchange’s systems and left many orders unfilled for hours. Telephone lines jammed. Specialists on the floor could not keep pace with the flood of paper. At times the tape itself ran late, so that traders were dealing with prices that no longer existed. The slide had not begun in New York. Over the weekend and through the night, markets in Hong Kong, Australia, and Europe had already fallen sharply. When American trading opened, the futures markets were already deep in the red, and a relatively new mechanism—portfolio insurance—began to work in reverse. Large institutional investors had adopted computer programs designed to sell stock-index futures automatically as prices declined, the idea being to limit losses. Once the selling started, the computers simply sold more. The programs fed on one another. What had been intended as protection became an accelerator. For those who watched the numbers cascade across screens, the memory of 1929 was never far away. Yet the country was not the same. Alan Greenspan had become chairman of the Federal Reserve only weeks earlier. By Tuesday morning the Fed issued a brief statement affirming that it stood ready to supply liquidity to the financial system. Banks were encouraged to keep lending. The panic, though severe, did not freeze the entire economy. Corporate earnings continued. The underlying expansion of the 1980s had not ended. By the close of the year the Dow had recovered a substantial portion of what it had lost, and the long bull market resumed its climb. What remains most striking, looking back, is the speed with which modern markets could transmit fear across continents, and the equal speed with which the American financial system absorbed the blow. The men and women on the exchange floor that day—specialists, clerks, floor brokers—worked through hours of chaos with little more than telephones, paper tickets, and the discipline of their craft. Outside, ordinary investors sat in living rooms and offices watching the same numbers, many of them for the first time truly understanding how quickly paper wealth could vanish. Black Monday did not destroy the market. It revealed, in a single afternoon, both the new vulnerabilities of electronic trading and the older strengths of an economy that kept producing, hiring, and building. America 250 🇺🇸