From “The Next Panic,” which appeared in the May 1987 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The complete article—along with the magazine’s entire 174-year archive—is available online at harpers.org/archive.

Early this year, I began to notice a peculiar thing in the Brooklyn neighborhood where I live: gatherings, in small nervous knots, of my stockbroker and investment-banker neighbors. These were successful people in their forties and fifties who were making large sums of money. So were their firms. So were their clients. With the market swinging wildly but generally and dramatically up, profits were falling to my neighbors in…