This chapter aims to explore the different facets of the collective memory of the 1987 Crash in the US, which represented an unprecedented collapse of prices on the global stock markets. The 22.3% fall of the Dow Jones on Black Monday (19 October 1987) represents the biggest single-day stock market collapse in history—even greater than that of 24 October 1929. The crash spread to other major financial markets over the world, but was quickly resolved thanks to the central banks’ intervention on the capital markets. In the context of Reaganomics, the crash can be seen as the first financial crisis of the second globalization wave in the strictest sense of the term ‘financial’, without taking into consideration the banking crises of the 1970s and the debt crisis in the early 1980s. However, unlike other financial crises, memories of this market break remained either vague or inexistent in public opinion, or fragmented and partial for economists and historians—until the subprime crisis. Since then, the 1987 warning and the potential dangers of uncontrolled markets were brought to light. The final lesson to be learned from this example of an evolving memory is about using the past.
The US Renal Data System at 30 Years: A Historical Perspective