Black Monday's 23% collapse of the stock market came on October 19, 1987.

We happen to recall this event vividly because when the market was experiencing its sizzling morning plunge on that day, we were speaking to a large auditorium of Salomon Brothers clients; and it was during the days before cell phones, at that.

Yet we had barely gotten wound up with dire talk of the fiscal disaster we had left behind in Washington when the room was soon abuzz; then it was roaring with desperate conversation; and finally, it just emptied itself in droves. By the time we realized it wasn't us alone that had generated this eruption, the market had lost nearly one-fifth of its accumulated value since it opened on the curbs of lower Manhattan in 1792.

As it happened, Greenspan was not about to be the Roy A. Young of 1987 (i.e. the Fed chairman in October 1929). So it was off to the races from that moment forward. Greenspan and his heirs and assigns never looked back.

If you don't think we've had total monetary regime failure since Greenspan and his heirs and assigns took over the Fed in Q3 1987, then riddle us this: what was so defective about an economy perking along at 5% economic growth as of 1985-1987 that required a drastic and permanent acceleration of the Fed's printing presses?

That is to say, at the end of his second term in June 1987, Tall Paul Volcker was still leaning into the residual inflation that had carried over from the printing press breakout of the 1970s. Accordingly, core CPI inflation was down from what had been the virulent 12.2% year-over-year (Y/Y) rate in Q4 1980 to 4.0% by Q2 1987 and was trending lower still.