NEW YORK 40°42.3′N 74°00.8′W
WALL ST RodeoWALL ST Rodeo

From Black Monday to a SpaceX IPO: why global stock exchanges are going wild

4.9 m
3.4 m
Compare it with the Checker Marathon taxi. When the sculpture appeared in New York in 1989, these yellow cabs, which had featured in Taxi Driver the previous decade, were still part of Manhattan street life.
separate parts
form the bull
Empty inside
5 cm
The horns were cast thicker, about 7.5 cm of bronze, because the sculptor knew they’d be touched most. Years of touch have worn away the darker patina.
The Bull's Route

How do you move three tonnes of bronze through Manhattan at night? In Di Modica’s case, with a flatbed truck, a few friends and no permission

Rotate
1987–1989
54 Crosby Street · SoHo, Manhattan

A workshop on Crosby Street

Di Modica built the bull in a cramped, semi-legal loft on Crosby Street. For almost two years, the sculpture was formed in clay, plaster and wax. The bronze was cast across the river at Bedi-Makky Art Foundry in Brooklyn, the family-run shop that had cast the Iwo Jima Memorial decades earlier.

Night of 15 December 1989
Broad Street, by 11 Wall Street · New York Stock Exchange

Night raid on Wall Street

At about 1:30 am, Di Modica and a few friends drove the bull into the Financial District. He had spent the previous nights studying the security routine and knew the guard would be gone for 4.5 minutes. They left the bull under the Christmas tree on Broad Street, outside the NYSE. No commission. No permit. By morning, brokers, tourists and journalists had gathered around it, while Di Modica handed out leaflets nearby.

Evening of 15 December 1989
NYPD impound lot · Queens, NY

Towed to a Queens impound

The bull lasted less than a day outside the exchange. By evening, the NYSE chairman had ordered it removed, and the NYPD had hauled it to an impound lot in Queens. Then the newspapers joined in. The New York Post ran “Bah, Humbug!” on its front page. A removal order became a citywide argument.

20 December 1989
Bowling Green Park · Broadway at Bowling Green

A permanent home at Bowling Green

Public outcry forced a compromise. The NYC Parks Department allowed the bull to return downtown, but not to the exchange. It went slightly south, to the small paved island at Bowling Green, beside the city’s oldest public park. The permit was temporary. It still is.

Bears vs Bulls

A bronze bull can hold one pose forever. Markets are less disciplined. Since the 18th century, traders have described them with two animals: the bull and the bear

A bull market is when prices rise broadly and continue to rise, often for months or years. A bear market is when they fall by 20% or more from a recent peak. Today, these names allude to the way each animal attacks. A bull throws its horns upward. A bear swipes down.

Direction is only part of it. A bull market runs on confidence: easy credit, rising earnings, and the belief that the next quarter will be larger than the last. A bear market runs on doubt. Yesterday’s prices suddenly look too high. Analysts counted 14 bull markets since 1932. On average, they lasted about five years and gained more than 170%. There have also been 14 bear markets since 1945. Those were shorter and sharper: an average fall of 36% over 289 days.

Now look at the drops. Five of the biggest and best-known crises of the past 70 years, shown on the same axis: how much the S&P 500 lost, how fast it fell, and how long it took to climb back.

Wall Street · 1973–2026Bear Markets
© Méridien 2026 — CC BY-NC 4.0. Data: Shiller; BLS CPI-U, accessed 1 Sep 2026; Yahoo Finance.
Dividends after Jun 2024 derived from S&P 500 total return. Oct 2025 CPI interpolated.

How far did the market fall?

This chart shows the S&P 500 in index points. Next, we will set the peak before each crash to 100%, so we can compare both how far the market fell and how long each crisis lasted.

Black Monday

In a single day, the S&P 500 fell 20%. Around $500 billion in market value disappeared within hours. Margin calls overwhelmed brokers, trading on the New York Stock Exchange slowed to a crawl, and Hong Kong shut its exchange for the rest of the week. By early December, the market was down 33% from its peak.

COVID-19 crash

The market fell faster than ever before. In one month, the S&P 500 lost 34% in nominal terms, or 19% after inflation. The drop was so sudden that US exchanges automatically halted trading four times in two weeks, something not seen since 1987. The trigger was the global lockdown, which brought much of the economy to an abrupt stop.

Global financial crisis

The market fell for 17 months, losing 53% in real terms. The housing bubble burst, banks failed, and Lehman Brothers collapsed in September 2008 after 158 years in business. Millions lost homes, jobs and retirement savings.

Oil shock and stagflation

The market fell for 21 months, losing about 57% after inflation. The 1973 oil embargo nearly quadrupled oil prices and caused fuel shortages. Inflation reached 12% as the economy entered recession and unemployment rose, a combination known as stagflation.

Dotcom bust

The dotcom bust lasted 25 months. Around $5 trillion in market value disappeared, more than Germany’s GDP at the time. The Nasdaq lost 78%. The S&P 500 fell 42% in real terms. Then came 9/11. The Enron and WorldCom scandals followed the case. The crash kept finding new material.

A real roller coaster?

Look at the chart up close. Regular drops of 30 to 50%. Long climbs back from the bottom. For investors living through them, these were not neat historical episodes. They were months, sometimes years, of watching money vanish. But if we look at the same data over a longer time horizon, everything changes.

Each one bounced back

In June 2026, the S&P 500 is around 7,500. That is more than 20 times its level before the 1987 crash, and almost five times its pre-2008 peak. On the long chart, even the ugly crashes start to look smaller.

Charging Bull

There is a small irony in the curve. Di Modica rolled his bull onto Wall Street in December 1989 as a symbol of strength after the crash. By then, the S&P 500 had already been back above its pre-1987 high for almost five months.

$350,000 in the S&P

Di Modica spent about $350,000 on the bull. If the same money had gone into the S&P 500 in October 1987, it would have been worth about $9.92 million by February 2021, during the GameStop mania. That is 28.3 times the original sum, with dividends reinvested.

Minus inflation

That is the nominal figure. Adjusted for inflation, the real value falls to $4.35 million, or 12.4 times the original sum. Inflation reduced the headline gain by about $5.57 million. Surely the famous sculpture must be worth more these days? Any bidders?

CRISIS Curve

From a distance, a crash looks simple. One line drops. Then comes the explanation.

In real time, it is messier. There are screens, rumours, margin calls, central banks, people trying to work out how much time they still have. This is why the rodeo image works better than the textbook. A market can throw people off in several ways. In 1987, automated selling helped turn a fall into a rout. In 2008, bad mortgages moved through bank balance sheets and into the wider economy. During the dotcom crash, profits could not keep up with valuations. In 2020, a virus closed airports and emptied offices.

So, what can we do? Hold on, if you can afford to. The S&P 500 recovered after Black Monday. It recovered after the dotcom crash, after 2008, and after COVID. In the end, time helps. You just have to get through the margin call, the redundancy, the bad mortgage, or the year when nothing feels temporary.

S&P 500 · Total return
Invested $ in the index
Drag the year flags on the axis to choose the holding period

Today, the pressure point is AI. The trade is being priced through physical infrastructure: data centres, chips, power, cooling, cloud capacity. Space companies sit in the same part of the market: capital-heavy, fast-growing and priced for a future that still has to arrive. SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share, raised $75 billion, and reached a valuation of about $1.77 trillion before trading began.

That valuation assumes years of growth and heavy demand. It assumes a market willing to keep funding expensive hardware before the returns are visible. This is how modern bubbles become harder to spot. They can be built from real technology, real factories, real customers.

Di Modica did not answer Black Monday with a forecast. He went back to his workshop and spent two years making a bull from clay, plaster, wax and bronze. By the time it reached Wall Street, the market had moved on. The recovery came first. The sculpture came later. Then it stayed there, ready for the next crash, the next boom, and the next crowd rubbing the bull’s balls for luck.

Published16 September 2026
Reading list
  1. 1.George Lee, Lucas Greenbaum. Tracking trillions: The assumptions shaping the scale of the AI build-out. Goldman Sachs, 2026
  2. 2.James Ramsay, Emily Nadal. Why do so many people want to touch the Wall Street bull’s testicles? Gothamist, 2025
  3. 3.Lewis Krauskopf. Wall Street’s bull market nears three years old; history shows it may still have life. Reuters, 2025
  4. 4.David Randall. Whispers of S&P 500 bear market grow louder as U.S. stock decline continues. Reuters, 2022
  5. The Dotcom Bubble Burst. International Banker, 2021
  6. 5.Anthony Haden Guest. Birth of the Bull. arturodimodica.com, 2021
  7. 6.Anthony Haden-Guest. Arturo di Modica: Charging Bull. Phillips Auctioneers, 2018
  8. 7.Dean Balsamini. Prototype of Wall Street bull statue sells for $37K at auction. New York Post, 2017
  9. 8.Tao Tao Holmes. Tourists love to rub the bronze balls of Wall Street’s Charging Bull statue. Atlas Obscura, 2016
  10. 9.Daniel B. Schneider. Bulls and Bears of Yore. The New York Times, 1997
  11. 10.Associated Press. Wall St.’s bronze bull moves 2 blocks south. The New York Times, 1989
  12. 11.Robert D. McFadden. SoHo gift to Wall St.: A 3 1/2-ton bronze bull. The New York Times, 1989

Acknowledgements: We would like to thank Di Modica’s Estate for maintaining Arturo’s legacy. Their website was an invaluable source of information for this feature.

Editorial team: Research, spatial and data storytelling Alexander Bogachev. Editing Elia Kabanov. Design Vasiliy Egorov. Development Vladimir Terentyev and Sergey Nikonets. Project management Anastasia Antipova. Product management Maria Karaselnikova. Art direction Eugene Yukechev.

Special thanks: Sergey Korol, Sasha Derivanov, Natalia Porshennikova, Dmitrii Demchenko, Andrey Kochanov, Amr Elenein, Ahmed Serag and Nahla ElBanhawy.

Credits: 3D Gaussian splatting scene by Méridien. Data sources: BLS.gov, Yahoo Finance, Robert J. Shiller (Yale University). Map engine: Mapbox. Bull and taxi 3D models: 3d_molier International, telsem. Portrait of Arturo Di Modica based on a photo by Artislife1406/Wikimedia. Photo of Fearless Girl by Anthony Quintano/Flickr.