As my wife Susie and I were strolling on the beach this past weekend, the topic of Black Monday came up. She was trying to recall the severity of that market crash, and I was thrust back into reliving some of the memories. Its interesting looking back to that time because we seemed to make it through. We took our lumps, learned our lessons, recovered and moved forward.

On Friday October 16, 1987, the Dow dropped over 100 points. Of course, that’s just a blink of an eye today, but at the time the Dow Jones Industrial Average was just above 2,200. The 100 point drop had people talking about the stock market everywhere we went that weekend.

I can very easily recall thinking that when Monday morning came, the market would rebound and all of the fear and doubt would disappear. I was wrong about that prediction. It seems that with all of the talk over the weekend, the fear had just been heightened. Everyone everywhere was talking about the market, and most of them very fearfully.

Back then, it seemed like Monday morning would never come. As stock brokers we had witnessed the market close above 1,000 for the first time in several years, in 1982. In the next five years it had more than doubled which was an incredible return. Now, as brokers, we all had a strong confidence that the 100 points lost on Friday would easily be made up, and then some, on Monday.

Well, as history has recorded, that isn’t what happened. In less than an hour after the opening bell, the market was down another 100 points. That was only the start as the Dow lost 500 plus points on Monday, October 19, 1987. The day has been referred to as “Black Monday” ever since. Think of it, people’s portfolios had lost over 25% in just two days of trading.

There were changes as a result of those days in October of 1987. These were changes which were designed to prevent such a thing from happening again. And now we have today’s crisis. What happened between then and now?

Back then, it didn’t take long for the market to regain momentum and close above 2,000 again. It did take the overall economy a period of time to stabilize. New regulations boosted confidence in the “system” and as a result there was more order in the financial markets. From then until now is much different.

There has been dramatically increasing greed on Wall Street, and regulations have been loosened. Also, we have a dollar which has lost value and real estate values which dropped off more than a year ago haven’t even started to rise. In addition, we have foreclosures at all time highs. On top of all of this, we are now handed a $700,000,000,000.00 bail out which we are told we must accept in order to keep the economy rolling. In essence it seems its a tab that the general public is being handed to cover the cost of corporate America’s excesses and failures as well as regulator’s loose handling of the economy for an extended period of time.

The Federal Government doesn’t like to talk about it, but we are in a recession. In my opinion, we are going to see worse before we see better. We could well see more bank failures, more jobs lost, and more foreclosures. I believe that more and more households will be affected before we begin to see improvement.

The same two questions keep coming back to me. The first is somewhat rhetorical, and that is; haven’t you seen this coming for a long time? The second is simple, given all of these conditions, what are you doing to secure your and your family’s financial future?