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- 01 30, 2025
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it is easy to think of stockmarket crashes as abrupt shocks. And some of the most dramatic of them were indeed abrupt. At the onset of the covid-19 pandemic, the & 500 index of American stocks plummeted by 34% in a little over a month. The last time Russia defaulted on its debt, in 1998, the index took six weeks to travel from zenith to nadir, nearly taking Long-Term Capital Management and the rest of Wall Street with it. Quickest of all was the lightning bolt of October 19th 1987, or “Black Monday”, which wiped 20% off the market in a single day.The biggest downturns, though, have tended to be much more drawn-out affairs. The bloodbath in equities that accompanied the financial crisis of 2007-09 was no single, vertiginous plunge: it played out over 17 months. Talk of the dotcom bubble “bursting” in the early 2000s can obscure the fact that the journey from peak to trough took two and a half years. The greatest crash of all, beginning in 1929, took nearly three years to run its course.