CNN News:黑色星期一股灾30年 美国股市达创纪录高位
AZUZ: Yesterday, we explained the U.S. stock market's record high. Ironically, it came on the 30th anniversary of its most dramatic one-day crash ever. I keep saying one-day crash because what happened in 1929 was spread out over a longer period of time and contributed to the worldwide Great Depression that lasted for years.
Compared to that, the 1987 drop was short-lived. Stocks recovered within months. There was no prolonged recession or depression. But especially to the investors who lived it, it was a day of near-hysteria, one from which the lessons learned include a plan intended to prevent it from ever happening again.
CHRISTINE ROMANS, cnn CHIEF BUSINESS CORRESPONDENT: October 19th, 1987, a day that would come to be known as Black Monday. The Dow plunged 22.6 percent. It had never happened before. It's still the biggest one day percentage loss of all time.
That means bigger than the 1929 stock market crash, or when trading reopened after the September 11th attacks or during the financial crisis that almost wipe out the global economy.
Here's how cnn reported Black Monday at the time.
LOU DOBBS, cnn HOST, MONEYLINE: Good evening. The stock market today crashed. The Dow Jones Industrials, every other major index, breaking records in its plummet downward.
ROMANS: Yes, it was a crash pure and simple. And it was blamed on a number of factors, heightened hostilities in the Persian Gulf, fear of higher interest rates, a five-year bull market without a significant correction at all, and program trading. But really, the word you heard over and over again —
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: This is a panic.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: People were panicking.
REPORTER: This nosedive was pure investor panic.
DOBBS: Well, panic is the only way to describe what happened on Wall Street today.
ROMANS: Panic, that's a big part of what separates a crash from just a really bad day on Wall Street. When emotion takes over, when trading is no longer calm or orderly, that's when Black Mondays are born.
So, could it happen again?
A panic is always theoretically possible, but a 22 percent decline on the Dow, that's less likely, because of circuit breakers first implemented after the Black Monday freefall. Circuit breakers kick in to halt trading when stocks dive too far too fast. Think of it as a trading timeout, designed to give investors a chance to calm down. In other words, to interrupt a panic, and maybe to prevent another Black Monday.