Melamed and Greenspan conferred by phone on the night of the 1987 crash

Evidence

Chicago, late evening, October 19, 1987. Leo Melamed leaves a dinner meeting in the Metropolitan Club on the sixty-seventh floor of the Sears Tower. He walks along Wacker Drive to the twin skyscrapers of the Mercantile Exchange, where his office is on the nineteenth floor, high above the exchange’s now-silent trading pits. His assistant greets him with a stack of pink message slips from those who have telephoned in his absence. As midnight approaches, “with sweating hands” he makes his first return call, to the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas. It is to Alan Greenspan, who two months earlier had been appointed to chair the Federal Reserve System’s Board of Governors. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 14

Categorization

• CANDY: An evocative scene-setting vignette of the Merc founding father phoning a brand-new Fed chair at midnight on Black Monday.