30 Years After 'Black Monday,' Has Wall Street Learned Its Lesson?

On Oct. 19, 1987, the stock market fell 22.6 percent, the largest single-day loss in Wall Street history. Though the day became known as "Black Monday," many of the details of what happened have been lost to history.

New York Times financial reporter Diana Henriques (@dianabhenriques) examines what led up to Black Monday and what lessons can be learned from it in "A First-Class Catastrophe: The Road to Black Monday, the Worst Day In Wall Street History." She joins Here & Now's Jeremy Hobson to talk about the book.

On what drove her to dive into Black Monday

"The 30th anniversary is coming up, and talking with younger people in my circle, even younger financial reporters, I was astonished at how little they knew about the 1987 crash. I lived through it myself as a reporter. But the mythology that has grown up around Black Monday is really an amazing monument to Wall Street amnesia, let me tell you. People will tell you, 'Oh it was no big deal, oh it was over in a day, it was one and done.' And nothing could be further from the truth. So it was sort of, I kinda wanted to solve a mystery here: Why has 'Black Monday' been so forgotten? Why have we not recognized what it was showing us and taken that to heart?"

On why the book opens in the 1970s

"The book opens on the silver crisis, which was a bubble in the silver market. But what was significant about that crisis — which was in the commodity market, far from Wall Street — was the way it quickly leapt the traditional firebreaks. The panic spread from market to market, from the commodity market to the brokerage industry to banks. And the various regulators of all those marketplaces barely knew each other's names. So we open on a world where official Washington is still kinda trapped in this delusion that there are all these isolated markets that can be regulated separately. And the silver crisis in 1980 blew that delusion apart, for those who were paying attention. And then along the way, I illustrate the repeated occasions when a panic refused to stay where it was supposed to. So that by the time you arrive at Black Monday, you understand that this didn't just pop out of a clear-blue sky. This was the culmination of a series of misjudgments, missteps, fundamental changes in how Wall Street worked."

On similarities between Black Monday and the 2008 financial crisis

"In 1987 there were these titan investors who used these untested derivatives in computer-driven strategies, and they nearly overwhelmed the balkanized regulatory system. Exactly the same thing happened in 2008: 'too big to fail' investors using untested derivatives in high-speed herd investing strategies, with fragmented oversight. So we're right back where we started only with exponentially larger scale and risks."

"This was the culmination of a series of misjudgments, missteps, fundamental changes in how Wall Street worked."

Diana Henriques

On the likelihood of another market crash happening for the same reasons

"We know we're going to have another financial crisis. We don't know when, but we know we will. How likely is it that we'll be ready? I will admit that I am concerned about that. I'm not sure that the focus in Washington is where it needs to be. There's a lot of talk about repealing the Dodd-Frank law that was adopted after the 2008 crisis, tinkering with it around the edges. That isn't what we need. We need to wipe the blackboard clean. We need to start from scratch and figure out the best way to regulate this modern, hyperautomated, extremely complex marketplace where we find ourselves."

On what she hopes people who don't work on Wall Street take away from the book

"I want them first of all to understand that this is not a mom-and-pop market. We're the mice on the elephants' dance floor here, and we need to understand our role. What I hope they will take away from the book is a clearer picture of how today's market works and how we got here. But I also hope they will realize that when the elephants are stampeding and running around with their ears on fire, what they should do, what you and I should do, is stay calm, stand pat and wait out the storm. And then when the dust settles, call your representative in Washington and demand that we finally get some meaningful action on regulatory reform."

By Diana Henriques

He was a towering six foot seven, his round, balding head perpetually wreathed in cigar smoke. Paul A. Volcker, the chairman of the Federal Reserve System, was formidable even when he was cheerful. On Wednesday afternoon, March 26, 1980, he was furious.

Volcker, in office for barely seven months, had been pulled out of a meeting by a frantic message from Harry Jacobs, the chairman of Bache Halsey Stuart Shields, the second-largest brokerage firm on Wall Street. The Fed had almost no authority over brokerage firms, but Jacobs said he thought “it was in the national interest” that he alert Volcker to a crisis in the silver market—a market over which the Fed also had virtually no authority.

Jacobs’s news was alarming. Silver prices were plummeting, and two of the firm’s biggest customers, a pair of billionaire brothers in Texas named William Herbert and Nelson Bunker Hunt, had told him the previous evening that they could not cover a $100 million debit in their Bache accounts, which they had used to amass millions of ounces of actual silver and paper claims on millions more. If silver prices fell further and the Hunts did indeed default on their debt to the firm, the silver they had pledged as collateral was no longer worth enough to cover their obligations. Bache was confronting a ruinous loss, possibly a threat to its financial survival. Jacobs suspected the Hunts also owed money to other major banks and Wall Street firms and may well have pledged more of their silver hoard as collateral.

Volcker immediately wanted to know which banks had made loans to the Hunts. He didn’t regulate Wall Street brokers or silver speculators, but he emphatically did regulate much of the nation’s banking system. There, at least, his authority to act was clear.

Indeed, Volcker had been responding to fire alarms in the banking system for weeks, as banks and savings and loans struggled with rising interest rates—themselves a consequence of Volcker’s attack on the raging inflation that had sapped the economy for nearly a decade. Confidence in America’s banks was as fragile as blown glass, and the last thing Volcker needed was a “bolt from the blue” like this. Yet, here was the head of Wall Street’s number-two firm warning him that some big banks were financing what sounded like wildly speculative silver trading by a couple of Texas plutocrats.

Within minutes, Volcker had reached out to Harold Williams, the urbane and seasoned chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the primary U.S. government regulator of Bache and its fellow brokerage firms. Williams was at a conference in Colonial Williamsburg; he ducked into a side room, spoke with Volcker about Bache, and then phoned to tell his staffers to check immediately on the rest of Wall Street’s exposure to the silver speculators. Williams then hurried back to Washington. A senior Treasury Department official and the comptroller of the currency (another bank regulator) were also alerted to the potential crisis. Both headed for the Fed’s headquarters on Constitution Avenue. Together, perhaps they could cover all the financial corners of this unfamiliar crisis.

To do that, the group needed a regulator with some authority over the silver markets. Volcker called the office of James M. Stone, who had been tapped less than a year earlier by President Jimmy Carter to be the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a young federal agency that regulated the market where most of this silver speculation had gone on.

At age thirty-two, Jim Stone—a cousin of the notable filmmaker Oliver Stone—had already studied at the London School of Economics and earned a doctorate in economics from Harvard. His doctoral thesis had been published as a prescient book predicting how computers would revolutionize Wall Street trading, first by doing the paperwork but ultimately by sweeping away the traditional stock exchanges entirely. Stone was a slight, brilliant, and determined young man, but his view that regulation played a positive role in the markets made him deeply unpopular in the industry he regulated and put him at odds with his more laissez-faire CFTC colleagues. One grumpy board member at a leading Chicago commodity exchange privately dismissed him as a “little twerp.” Almost everyone in political circles (except Volcker, apparently) knew that young Dr. Stone had become so isolated at the CFTC that he could barely get support for approving the minutes of the last meeting.

When Volcker got Stone on the phone, his question was similar to the one he had asked Harold Williams at the SEC: how big a stake did the Hunt brothers have in his market?

“I can’t tell you that. It’s confidential,” Stone said.

The politely delivered answer stopped Volcker cold; he was momentarily speechless. Then he let loose.

Volcker conceded later that he “did not react very well” to Stone’s refusal to share the vital information, even after the CFTC chairman explained that a law passed in 1978 barred his agency from revealing customer trading positions, even to other regulators. Stone simply did not have the authority to comply with the Fed chairman’s request.

Stone, like Volcker, instantly saw that the silver crisis was a danger to the financial system because of the hidden web of loans that linked the banks and the brokerage firms to the Hunts and to one another. He promptly headed for Volcker’s office. Sometime later, the SEC’s Harold Williams arrived. Aides shuttled in and out, working the telephones, checking silver prices, and pressing bankers and brokerage finance officers for straight answers.

By 6 p.m., as twilight filled the deep, high windows of Volcker’s office, the ad hoc group had finally established that at least a half-dozen major Wall Street firms, including Merrill Lynch and Paine Webber, had set up trading accounts for the Hunts and that a number of major banks had been lending money to those firms, or directly to the Hunts, since at least the previous summer, transactions secured by a growing pile of rapidly depreciating silver.

Eight months earlier, on August 1, 1979, silver was trading below $10 an ounce. Prices rose through Labor Day, past Thanksgiving, and into the Christmas holidays. At $20 an ounce, silver had broken out of its traditional ratio to gold. At $30 an ounce, the sky-high price prompted newlyweds to sell their sterling flatware before burglars could steal it. Printers and film manufacturers, which used silver as a raw material, started laying off workers and feared bankruptcy. Through it all, the Hunts kept buying, largely with borrowed money.

Then, on January 17, 1980, silver prices paused at $50 an ounce and started to slide. At that point, the Hunts’ hoard was worth $6.6 billion. After that date, prices dropped sharply; they had fallen to $10.80 on Tuesday, March 25, the day before Harry Jacobs at Bache called Volcker. At that price, the Hunts owed far more than their silver would fetch in the cash market, and their lenders were pressing for more collateral of some kind.

It was on that Tuesday evening that the brothers told Jacobs they were unable to pay anything more. The next day, they shared the same unwelcome news with their other brokers. Crisis had arrived, and panic might quickly follow if a big bank or brokerage firm failed as a result of the Hunts’ default.

That’s where Paul Volcker stepped into the story. After their Wednesday war room conference, held together more by personality and mutual respect than by any clear lines of authority, Volcker and his fellow regulators sweated out Thursday’s trading day. Stone, in defiance of the CFTC’s legislative restrictions, had finally given his fellow regulators an estimate of how much money the Hunts owed in his market: $800 million. That figure, which turned out to be an understatement, was so staggering it prompted the shocked bank regulators immediately to order examiners to visit various vaults to be sure that the Hunt brothers hadn’t pledged the same silver to multiple lenders.

By Thursday, the rest of Wall Street had gotten wind of the silver crisis, and the stock market had a wild day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by as much 3.5 percent before stabilizing, as traders reacted to rumors that the Hunts and some of their creditors were dumping stocks to raise desperately needed cash.

Of course, it is true that every share of stock that is sold is also bought—by someone, at some price. When far more people want to sell than to buy, prices have to drop sharply before buyers will bid for even a few shares. The term heavy selling, then, means that shares can be sold only at increasingly lower prices—not that everyone is selling and no one is buying.

With that caveat, “heavy selling” is what happened as the stock market reacted to fears of a default by the Hunt brothers. One Wall Street veteran said that Thursday’s trading reminded him of the frenzied response to President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. A Treasury official called the leadership at the New York Stock Exchange several times that day to assess how it was faring in the storm. The fear in Washington and on Wall Street was that the Hunts’ failure to pay their creditors would mean that those creditors would default on their own debts, spreading the contagion.

Infusions of cash by the owners of the most vulnerable silver trading houses prevented an immediate disaster, but the reality was that no one really knew where all the fault lines ran, or how much time they had before the next aftershock. The silver crisis made headlines across the country, and “Silver Thursday” entered Wall Street’s diary of very bad days.

By Friday, March 28, the price of silver had crept up a little, and the crisis seemed to have eased, but the Hunts still owed a lot of people a lot of money. By Sunday afternoon, March 30, it was clear they wouldn’t be able to pay it unless someone lent them the money to do so. It was a crazy dilemma, but one where Volcker’s authority was clear. The Fed chairman looked at the widening cracks in the nation’s financial foundation. He considered the pressure that another year or two of high interest rates would put on the banking industry, and how a bank failure would impair the Fed’s fight against inflation. He held his nose and stood watchfully on the sidelines as a team of bankers, all conveniently attending an industry convention in Boca Raton, Florida, negotiated through Sunday night over the terms of a new $1.1 billion loan for the Hunt brothers, secured largely by the family oil company. The loan would allow them to pay their staggering debts on Wall Street.

On Monday morning, with the bankers still working on the fine print, Jim Stone of the CFTC took a seat at a huge, microphone-studded conference table in a House of Representatives hearing room on Capitol Hill. Also summoned to the hearing were Harold Williams of the SEC and a senior Treasury official involved in the crisis.

The subcommittee chairman was a veteran New York Democrat named Benjamin Rosenthal, and he was as angry as Volcker had been five days earlier. “We are deeply concerned that the activities of a handful of commodity speculators could have such a profound effect on our nation’s financial markets,” he said in his opening remarks.

What was especially new and scary was that the crisis involved commodities markets, banks, brokerage houses, the stock market, and even the oil business, the source of the Hunt brothers’ wealth. Rosenthal demanded to know if there had been sufficient coordination among the CFTC, the SEC, the Treasury, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Federal Reserve.

The worrisome response: Maybe not. But the improvised effort (and the lucky rebound in silver prices) had prevented a series of domino defaults, and the regulators promised to do better if they ever faced a similarly messy crisis again.

Early in the hearing, Stone was asked for details about the Hunts’ silver holdings.

“I cannot discuss position information,” Stone replied, in a frustrated echo of his answer to Volcker. “That is forbidden by Congress.”

More knowledgeable about the ban than Volcker had been, Rosenthal snapped back, “You are forbidden to make it public. It is not forbidden to give it to Congress.”

“It is not forbidden to give it to Congress,” Stone conceded, a bit awkwardly. “Our commission has voted—with myself in the minority, I might add—to do that only upon subpoena.”

Rosenthal held tense, hurried consultations with staff aides. The CFTC was not under the control of Rosenthal’s subcommittee; the commission was supervised by the House and Senate agriculture committees, because of its importance to the producers and users of farm commodities such as wheat, pork bellies, and soybeans. “We’re going to deal with that as a separate issue,” Rosenthal said. It was apparent that the chain of command in Congress was as tangled as it was among regulators.

A few moments later, Rosenthal observed that Stone had voted against many of the CFTC decisions in the silver matter. “The majority of the commission seems to be going down one road and you seem to be going down another road,” he said.

“There are certainly differences in philosophy,” Stone answered. “My philosophy tends to hold that where these markets affect the financial fabric of the United States, more regulation is needed. That is the case even if these markets do not in themselves pose substantial dangers.” He added, “I do not think that is the majority view of the commission.”

Indeed, the majority of the CFTC had done little to forestall the unfolding silver crisis except to “jawbone” the exchanges where the Hunts were trading, urging them to use their “self-regulatory” power to do something.

“The market, in a very real sense, cured itself,” one CFTC commissioner proudly testified. He and another commissioner stoutly denied that this uproar in their markets posed any threat to the nation’s financial health.

Then it was Harold Williams’s turn as a witness.

The SEC chairman was asked about concerns he had expressed at previous hearings about the “efficacy” of the CFTC. “I would say we have more concern today than we did last Tuesday—significantly more,” he answered.

From then on, as Stone sat silently at the table, the SEC chairman and, later, the deputy Treasury secretary who worked on the silver crisis rehashed the jurisdictional warfare that had beset the CFTC from the moment it was born. It was a discussion that would become numbingly familiar in the years to come.

Excerpted from the book A FIRST-CLASS CATASTROPHE by Diana Henriques. Copyright © 2017 by Diana Henriques. Republished with permission of Henry Holt and Co.