The 1987 stock market crash, whose anniversary fell this week, still features more prominently in the popular memory than any financial disaster since 1929. No doubt the speed of the fall, which knocked 22 per cent off the Dow Jones Industrial Average on the single day of Black Monday, helps explain that fact.

For financial sophisticates the shock was magnified because it struck in the wrong place. Japan, where the stolid utility Nippon Telephone & Telegraph was trading on a price-earnings multiple close to 300, was in the grip of a more conspicuous bubble. And for the British, the memory of the collapse is vividly associated with a freak hurricane on the preceding Friday that severely disrupted the stock market. Yet, paradoxically, the impact of the crash on the real economy was relatively benign.