Panic of '87

The Panic of '87 is a financial crisis in Dan Davis’s account of the thirty years he missed during cold sleep. It first appears as one item in a compressed history of a changed world, then returns as a tempting explanation for the disappearance of his investments; the fuller account distinguishes the panic from the later, deliberate looting that destroyed Master Insurance.

Place in the Thirty-Year History

While catching up on events during his long absence, Dan finds that the Panic of '87 is among the historical summaries he must absorb. He gives it little attention at first, skipping over it alongside wider changes: gold has become cheap and is no longer the basis of money, and the Great Asia Republic has gained ground in South American trade. The crisis is thus introduced not through a dramatic scene of market panic but as one event in a crowded thirty-year history that Dan is trying to reconstruct.

The Lost Investments

The panic becomes immediate when Dan consults his breakfast copy of the Times and insists that some of his stocks are still in good shape. Mr. Doughty tells him that he owns no stocks because Master Insurance has gone broke. Dan asks whether the Panic caused the loss, connecting the financial disaster he had earlier skimmed past to the vanished value of his investments.

Connection to the Mannix Group Collapse

Mr. Doughty rejects the panic as a sufficient explanation. Master Insurance failed as part of the collapse of the Mannix Group, after the Panic, though he says the chain of events could be traced back to it. The decisive cause of the insurer’s ruin, however, was systematic looting: by the time the wrongdoing was discovered, the company had been reduced to a hollow shell, and the people responsible were beyond extradition. In Doughty’s account, an ordinary receivership might have salvaged something; this was a company emptied from within.

Meaning and Consequences

The episode turns Dan’s historical catch-up into a personal reversal. A crisis that he had treated as a passing item in a summary becomes the first explanation he reaches for when told his investments are gone, but the explanation proves incomplete: the Panic belongs to the background of the later collapse, while deliberate financial crime accounts for the total loss. Doughty adds that the looting could not happen under present laws, a reassurance Dan does not accept. The event therefore marks both the scale of change across the years he missed and the limits of a simple story in which a market panic alone explains what happened to his property.