The first major panic day of the 1987 global stock-market crash was nicknamed Black Monday.
Black Monday was October 19, 1987. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 22.6%, its largest one-day percentage decline in history. Stock markets in Europe, Asia, and elsewhere also suffered severe losses, making the event a genuinely global crash rather than an isolated Wall Street decline.
Several forces contributed to the panic, including high share valuations, rising interest rates, trade tensions, and computerized portfolio-insurance strategies. Those strategies used automatic selling rules intended to limit losses, but widespread selling added pressure when markets began to fall. The precise combination of causes remains a subject of economic study.
The crash differed from 1929 in important ways. The U.S. economy did not enter a Great Depression after 1987, and markets later recovered. Regulators also introduced circuit breakers, which can temporarily halt trading during unusually sharp price movements.