Market Crises & Events
The Black Monday Crash of 1987
Black Monday set the template. Every market dislocation that followed borrowed something from the afternoon of October 19, 1987 — the speed of the drop, the role of…
Market Crises & Events
Market Crises & Events
The Crash of 1929
There was an old fellow on the Salomon block desk named Addy Cartwright who’d started as a runner at Hornblower & Weeks in 1931, two years after the…
Market Crises & Events
The Tulip Mania of 1637: The First Speculative Bubble
The Tulip Mania of 1637 sits four centuries behind us, far enough that it has hardened into a parable: Dutch artisans trading their cottages for flower bulbs and…
Market Crises & Events
The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997
On July 2, 1997, the Bank of Thailand abandoned the baht’s peg to the US dollar, and the currency lost roughly a fifth of its value before the…
Market Crises & Events
The Flash Crash of May 6, 2010
The cleanest way to read May 6, 2010 is as a feedback loop with no saturation term. A volume-participation algorithm sells faster as traded volume rises; faster selling…
Market Crises & Events
The 2008 Financial Crisis
I grew up on the third block inland from the water in Buckroe Beach, a neighborhood of Hampton, Virginia, and by the autumn of 2010 three of the…
Market Crises & Events
The LTCM Collapse of 1998: When Genius Failed
A balance-sheet leverage ratio of 30:1 means that a 3.3% adverse move on notional wipes out the equity base. That is the arithmetic, before anything is said about…
Market Crises & Events
The Dot-Com Bubble
I lost €3,000 on a Solana meme coin in late 2021. That’s my dot-com bubble — smaller scale, 20 years late, exact same mechanic. So when I read…
Market Crises & Events
The Hunt Brothers Silver Corner of 1980
March 27, 1980. I was nineteen, a runner at Dean Witter, and I didn't have a silver position to lose. A fellow named Bobby Castellano did. Bobby ran…
Market Crises & Events
The South Sea Bubble of 1720
The South Sea Bubble of 1720 is the episode in which the share price of a chartered London company rose more than eightfold inside six months and gave…
Market Crises & Events
The Japan Asset Price Bubble (1986-1991)
At its 1989 peak, the land beneath the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo was reckoned to be worth more than the entire state of California, a claim that…
Market Crises & Events
The COVID-19 Market Crash of March 2020
33.9% in 23 trading days. That’s how fast the S&P 500 fell from its February 19, 2020 record high to its March 23 low — the fastest move…
Market Crises & Events
The GameStop Short Squeeze of January 2021
I was 17 when GameStop happened. Watching it on a Discord server full of people my age who had never owned a stock before, refreshing Yahoo Finance on…