If it's not too much trouble, would you please stop using words like "plunge" to describe relatively modest stock market declines? A 5.6% drop in the Dow-Jones Industrial Average of the kind reported on the front page of today's Washington Post (and many other outlets) is not a plunge. Yes a 635 point decline is bad, no it is not in any way a desirable occurrence, but call it what is without needlessly stoking people's anxieties.
I grant you that the point drop in raw numbers is larger than the 508 point decline of the October 19th 1987 stock market crash, but even that doesn't justify the terminology because stocks were trading at much lower levels then. Prior to the 1987 crash, the historical peak of the Dow-Jones Industrial Average had been 2722 in August of that year and had been trending down since that peak. The October 19th drop from 2246 to 1738 was a decline of just over 22%.
Let's recap. A 22% drop is a crash. A decline of less than 6% is no more a crash than the previous day's 4% increase meant that the Dow "skyrocketed". These things require perspective, and that's something that's been in short supply lately. Thank you for your attention to this matter.
Sincerely,
Don
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