ABSTRACT
As Richard Roll showed in his paper on the international aspects of the crash, the markets in East Asia opened first on the 19th and were way down. The selling wave spread from there to Britain and from there to the United States. People always smile when they hear the Ways and Means Committee’s tax proposals as the likely trigger for the crash. The taxes would have raised only a few hundred million dollars, after all, and equities declined by a half trillion or so. In a deep sense, of course, that is why the 1987 crash attracted so much attention at the time. At the back of everyone’s mind was the fear that it was all going to happen again – that a 1930s-style great depression was on the way.
