Markets don’t dance to a tune
Crashes fade from our collective memory — and that’s a problem, writes David Harding
I don’t remember leaving our Cannon Street office on the evening of Black Monday, October 19 1987. But I remember vividly where I was two hours later, at 8.30pm. I was standing at the bar in Kettners, a fashionable Soho restaurant, drinking champagne at least partly to celebrate the profits made by Adam, Harding & Lueck, the company I had started that year with two partners. We had been betting on stock markets around the world declining. The FTSE 100 had obligingly done exactly that the previous Friday, when City offices were half-empty following the UK’s worst storm in living memory. That Monday, there had been further heavy falls in US stocks, and we wereagain making money for our clients. The Dow Jones industrial index had just closed down 508 points that day — the biggest one-day fall in US stocks of all time. I also remember vividly what happened 12 hours later. While I was in a meeting at our offices with a prospective client, bond and interest rate markets began rallying str...
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