What past market crashes have looked like

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.