The Economy: The Day of the Bear

THE ECONOMY (See Cover) The night of Blue Monday, 1962, was the grimmest evening on the New Frontier since the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Measured by the Dow-Jones industrial average, the stock market was down 35 points in the deepest one-day plunge since the black year of 1929. Panicky drops had followed on European stock exchanges, and who could say just where and when it would stop? President Kennedy told staffers to prepare an agenda for a meeting next morning with his chief economic advisers.

The President met in...

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