The 30th anniversary of Black Monday is looming, and I remember the day vividly. I was on the trading desk at Salomon Brothers, and the milestone has me thinking of the root causes of the crash, when the Dow Jones industrial average plunged nearly 23 percent on Oct. 19, 1987.
In the fall of 1987, I was coming to the end of my fifth year (of 15) at Salomon. I was a vice president and sales trader covering the trading desks of institutions like Harvard Management, MFS, State Street Bank (the forerunner of State Street Global) and Loomis Sayles. Younger people may not know this, but Salomon, along with Goldman Sachs, was the most important trading desk on Wall Street at that time.
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