Black Monday (1987) in the context of "Index futures"

Charging Bull (sometimes referred to as the Bull of Wall Street or the Bowling Green Bull) is a bronze sculpture that stands on Broadway just north of Bowling Green in the Financial District of Manhattan in New York City. The 7,100-pound (3,200 kg) bronze sculpture, standing 11 feet (3.4 m) tall and measuring 16 feet (4.9 m) long, depicts a bull, the symbol of financial optimism and prosperity. Charging Bull is a popular tourist destination that draws thousands of people a day, symbolizing Wall Street and the Financial District.

The sculpture was created by Italian artist Arturo Di Modica in the wake of the 1987 Black Monday stock market crash. Late in the evening of Thursday, December 14, 1989, Di Modica arrived on Wall Street with Charging Bull on the back of a truck and illegally dropped the sculpture outside of the New York Stock Exchange Building. After being removed by the New York City Police Department later that day, Charging Bull was installed at Bowling Green on December 20, 1989. Despite initially having only a temporary permit to be located at Bowling Green, Charging Bull became a popular tourist attraction. Di Modica may have been influenced by a pair of huge metallic sculptures, a charging bull and a bear, placed in front of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in 1985 as part of the 400th anniversary celebration of the exchange.

The 1973–1974 stock market crash caused a bear market between January 1973 and December 1974. Affecting all the major stock markets in the world, particularly the United Kingdom, it was one of the worst stock market downturns since the Great Depression, the other being the 2008 financial crisis. The crash came after the collapse of the Bretton Woods system over the previous two years, with the associated 'Nixon Shock' and United States dollar devaluation under the Smithsonian Agreement. It was compounded by the outbreak of the 1973 oil crisis. It was a major event of the 1970s recession.

All the main stock indices of the future G7 bottomed out between September and December 1974, having lost at least 34% of their value in nominal terms and 43% in real terms. The recovery was a slow process. West Germany's market was the fastest to recover, returning to the same level by June 1985. The United Kingdom returned to the same market level by May 1987, but this full recovery lasted for only a few months and ended with the Black Monday crash of 1987. The United States returned to the same market level by August 1993, over twenty years after the 1973–74 crash began.

The Greenspan put was a monetary policy response to financial crises that Alan Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, exercised beginning with the crash of 1987. Successful in addressing various crises, it became controversial as it led to periods of extreme speculation led by Wall Street investment banks overusing the put's repurchase agreements (or indirect quantitative easing) and creating successive asset price bubbles. The banks so overused Greenspan's tools that their compromised solvency in the 2008 financial crisis required Fed chair Ben Bernanke to use direct quantitative easing (the Bernanke put). The term Yellen put was used to refer to Fed chair Janet Yellen's policy of perpetual monetary looseness (i.e. low interest rates and continual quantitative easing).

In Q4 2019, Fed chair Jerome Powell recreated the Greenspan put by providing repurchase agreements to Wall Street investment banks as a way to boost falling asset prices; in 2020, to combat the financial effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, Powell re-introduced the Bernanke put with direct quantitative easing to boost asset prices. In November 2020, Bloomberg noted the Powell put was stronger than both the Greenspan put or the Bernanke put, while Time noted the scale of Powell's monetary intervention in 2020 and the tolerance of multiple asset bubbles as a side-effect of such intervention, "is changing the Fed forever."