1987: Daily trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange exceeds 300 million for the first time, as 302.4 million shares change hands.

Museum of American Financial History; http://www.nyse.com/marketinfo

1932: The Reconstruction Finance Corp. is created under a law signed today by Pres. Herbert Hoover. The RFC, funded with $1.5 billion, lends aggressively to faltering railroads and banks, as well as to municipalities seeking to finance relief programs and public-works projects. But it’s just a drop in the bucket of the Great Depression.

Barrie A. Wigmore, The Crash and Its Aftermath: A History of Securities Markets in the United States, 1929-1933 (Greenwood Press, Westport, CT, and London, 1985), p. 311.