Black Friday

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sharp drop in a financial market. The original Black Friday was September 24, 1869, when a group of financiers tried to corner the gold market and precipitated a business panic followed by a depression. The panic of 1873 also began on Friday, and Black Friday now applies to any Friday when there is a debacle affecting the financial markets.

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1.  Also Black Monday, Black Tuesday, etc. A day of economic catastrophe, as in We feared there'd be another Black Friday. This usage dates from September 24, 1869, a Friday when stock manipulators Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to corner the gold market and caused its collapse. The adjective black has been appended to similar occasions ever since, including October 29, 1929, the Tuesday of the market collapse that marked the start of the Great Depression, and Black Monday of October 19, 1987, when the stock market experienced its greatest fall since the Great Depression.
2.  Any day marked by great confusion or activity, as in It was just my luck to be traveling on Black Tuesday. This usage, too, is based on the events of 1869, marked by economic chaos. It has since been extended to other kinds of confusion, such as an accident hampering traffic during the evening rush hour.

Black Friday (24 September 1869) was the climactic day of an effort by the financiers Jay Gould and James Fisk Jr., with the help of President Ulysses S. Grant's brother-in-law Abel Rathbone Corbin and one or two associates, to corner the ready gold supply of the United States. Because the nation was then on a paper money basis, gold was dealt in as a speculative commodity on the New York exchange. On 2 September Gould began buying gold on a large scale; on 15 September, Fisk also began buying heavily and soon forced the price from $135 to $140. The movement excited much suspicion and fear, and the New York Tribune argued that the Treasury had the "plain and imperative" duty to sell gold and break up the conspiracy. Secretary of the Treasury George S. Boutwell visited New York but decided not to act. Meanwhile, Grant had gone to Washington, Pennsylvania, and was out of touch until he returned to Washington, D.C., on 22 September. On 23 September, with gold at $144, the New York panic grew serious.

On 24 September, as the price rose to $160, Secretary Boutwell urged the sale of $3 million of the federal government's gold reserve. Grant suggested $5 million, and Boutwell telegraphed an order to sell $4 million. Gould, perhaps forewarned by the head of the New York sub-treasury, had already begun selling, and gold sank rapidly to $135. Fisk immediately found means to repudiate his contracts. The episode ruined scores of investors, caused heavy indirect losses to business, and placed an ugly smirch on the Grant administration. Gould and Fisk made an $11 million profit.

Bibliography

Ackerman, Kenneth D. The Gold Ring: Jim Fisk, Jay Gould, and Black Friday, 1869. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1988.

Boutwell, George S. Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs. New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1902.

Brands, H. W. Masters of Enterprise: Giants of American Business from John Jacob Astor and J. P. Morgan to Bill Gates and Oprah Winfrey. New York: Free Press, 1999.

McFeely, William S. Grant: A Biography. Newtown, Conn.: American Political Biography Press, 1996. The original edition was published in 1981.

—Allan Nevins/C. P.

Various

Black Friday usually refers either to the infamous Wall Street Panic of September 24, 1869, when Jay Gould and James Fisk tried to "corner" the gold market, or to September 19, 1873, when stock failures caused the Panic of 1873. In England, it is often used by workers to describe May 12, 1926, the day on which the General Strike was ended. It is occasionally used to refer to Good Friday.

Shoppers and retailers in the United States sometimes refer to the day after Thanksgiving as Black Friday because it marks the beginning of the Christmas commercial season and is traditionally a frenetic day of shopping.

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1. A day of stock market catastrophe. Originally, September 24, 1869, was deemed Black Friday. The crash was sparked by gold speculators, including Jay Gould and James Fist, who attempted to corner the gold market. The attempt failed and the gold market collapsed, causing the stock market to plummet. 

2. The day after Thanksgiving in the United States. Retailers generally see an upward spike in sales and consider this to be the start of the holiday shopping season. It's common for retailers to offer special promotions and to open early to draw in customers.  

Investopedia Says:
1. The term "black" has been used to describe other disastrous days in financial markets. For example, on Black Tuesday, October 29, 1929, the market fell precipitously, signaling the start of the Great Depression. The largest one-day drop in stock market history occurred on Black Monday, October 19, 1987, when the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeted more than 22%.

2. The idea behind the term "Black Friday" is that this is the day in which retail stores have enough sales to put them "in the black" - an accounting expression that alludes to the practice of recording losses in red and profits in black.

Related Links:
Learn about the series of events that triggered the Great Depression. The Crash Of 1929 - Could It Happen Again?
From a tulip craze to a dotcom bubble, read the cautionary tales of the stock market's greatest disasters. The Greatest Market Crashes
Investors are only human, and their irrational behavior can often move the market. Market Problems? Blame Investors

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