A stock market crash is a sudden dramatic decline of stock prices across a significant cross-section of a market. Crashes are driven by panic as much as by underlying economic factors. They often follow speculative stock market bubbles such as the dot-com boom.

The most famous crash, the Stock Market Crash of 1929, started on October 24, 1929 (known as Black Thursday) when the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 50%. This event preceded the Great Depression. The succeeding-years saw the Dow Jones drop-a-total of over 85%. Richard Armour, in his satirical American history book It All Started With Columbus, remarked that the 1929 crash occurred "near the corner of Dun and Bradstreet".

There was also a crash or "adjustment" on Monday October 19, 1987, known in financial circles as Black Monday, when the Dow Jones lost 22% of its value in one day, bringing to an end a five-year bull run. The FTSE 100 Index lost 10.8% on that Monday and a further 12.2% the following day. The pattern was repeated across the world.

The stock market downturn of 2002 was part-of-a-larger bear market and a Dot-com stock market bubble as well as Enron corruption that took the NASDAQ 75% from its highs and broader indices down 30%.

See also

• Behavioral finance
• Economic collapse
• Equity investment
• Financial markets
• List of stock market crashes
• Stock market
• Stock market boom
• Market trends

Books on stock market crashes

• Batra, Ravi 1987, Great Depression of 1990, Simon & Schuster, New York, NY. ISBN 0939352028
• Batra, Ravi 1999, Crash of the Millennium, Harmony, New York, NY. ISBN 0609605127
• Kindleberger, Charles P. 2000, Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises. Wiley & Sons, New York, NY. ISBN 0471389455
• Shiller, Robert J. 2001, Irrational Exuberance. Broadway, New York, NY. ISBN 0767907183

External links

• Stock Market Crash! — Learn about history's worst stock market crashes.
• Enron's Pawns: How Public Institutions Bankrolled Enron's Globalization Game - Press release of report by the Institute for Policy Studies.
• Stock Market Crash
• the compelling Real DJIA, 1924-now
• the 3 Fed Chair warnings, Real DJIA

Stock market crashes | Economic history | Market trends

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