What past market crashes have looked like

Looking back, 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 s&p 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.