Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms

After the US stock market collapse on "Black Monday" October 19, 1987, the US Treasury Department set up this task force to study the causes and possible mitigations of future drops. The report blamed automatic trading programs for generating huge sell orders. After Black Monday, regulators overhauled trade-clearing protocols to bring uniformity to all prominent market products. They also developed new rules, known as "trading curbs" or colloquially as circuit breakers, allowing exchanges to temporarily halt trading in instances of exceptionally large price declines in some indexes.