Gordon Gekko got it wrong. Greed is for wimps. And lunch is good.

We've learned so much since 1987. Well, in some ways.

Twenty years ago next month, the stock market crashed—a great, bone-crunching, teeth-cracking dive, like when your Aunt Tilly has seven martinis and tries to get down the stairs. The YouTube generation probably can't comprehend the panic then.

On a single day, October 19, the Dow Jones industrial average dropped nearly 23 percent. The only worse one-day crash before or since came on December 12, 1914—after New York markets had been closed for six months because of World War I.

In '87, lots of people worried that America was in for the kind of multi-day meltdown that preceded the Great Depression. Thankfully, Guns 'N' Roses released Appetite for Destruction in 1987, or we all might've turned to Woody Guthrie records.

The '87 crash seems ridiculously long ago. Junk bonds were a new fad then and Ivan Boesky made millions as the world's greatest "arbitrageur," which sounded Gaul-ish and fancy until Boesky went to jail.

Drexel Burnham Lambert ruled financial markets from Beverly Hills and Mike Milken in '87 made $550 million-which sounded modern and enviable until Milken, too, went to jail.

The Dow broke through 2,000 in January; 2,500 in July. Such numbers worked like dopamine, sending investors into euphoria. Oliver Stone's Wall Street landed in theaters. Michael Douglas spoke for a generation of pinstriped, power-tied financial hawks when his Gordon Gekko character pronounced that greed is good and lunch is for wimps. We had a new hero for a new age.

And then, the reckoning. The crash seemed to turn the world around. Big things happened. Even if the 1987 crash wasn't a cause, it seemed like a marker.

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