Black Monday
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been watching this show called Black Monday. It follows the events leading up to the stock market crash in 1987, but it is fictitious. It was the largest stock market crash in Wall Street history, but the truth is that no one really knows what really caused it. It has been a great mystery in history even to this day. This television series on Showtime, however, illustrates one theory of how this crash happened….
On October 19, 1987, the largest one-day percentage drop in stock market history. Companies such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 22.61%. The stock dropped 508 points resulting in 1738.74. In an instant, everything was lost and there was no way to explain it. Wall Street went into chaos and many couldn’t process the extent of what had happened and how much money was lost.
Especially at this point, Wall Street was ruthless and centered around side deals and deception. There were a lot of back door deals led by selfish and greedy CEOs. The Showtime television series documents and follows a series of characters -- some of which who are already involved in the deception and others who ultimately get sucked into it all. It showcases the horrors and the faults in the stock market and just how fragile the entire system really is.
Although there isn’t a lot of information on the specific event, it paints a bigger picture in that it exploits the inconsistencies and cracks in the stock market system. It shows just how easy it is for everything to fall apart and how fast everything can just disappear without a trace. I think that this show is important because it deals with a big part of American culture, and also creates a story around it. There will always be a mystery around Black Monday, but the inherent weak system that is the stock market is not.
Note: I really recommend this show. Don Cheadle, Regina Hall, and Andrew Rannells star in it and they do an amazing job. FYI it aired on Showtime.
I think that this is interesting because I actually remember this moment from the Wolf of Wall street when Jordan decides to work in penny stocks after many prominent firms on wall street closed or had massive layoffs because of the crash. I also think that it's interesting because many people believed that the American economy had entered a permanent bull market and that recessions were a thing of the past but of course this wasn't true.
ReplyDelete