To look at the history of financial markets is to dissect data and uncover narratives that hold the power to astonish.
The first is that market crashes prior to 1987 heralded the onset of economic conditions that were dire. However, 1987’s ‘Black Monday’ was the first of a new breed: a crash that suggested dire consequences but in the end had no serious effects at all. The subsequent bursting of the Internet bubble, the Russian default, and the collapse of LTCM had seemed, in the heat of the moment, to change the world as we know it, and yet turned out to be a big deal.
