Plunge Protection Team - PPT

What a plumber needs when he's called to fix a really disgusting toilet clog. Like, if things in a dive bar bathroom get funky during Curry Tuesday.

Actually, the Plunge Protection Team is a nickname for a government organization set up to monitor the markets following the stock market crash of 1987. It doesn't get that much press these days, because it didn't have much lasting impact on the economy (as compared to the Crash of 1929, or market meltdown that accompanied the financial crisis of 2008), but the stock market suffered one of its all-time biggest single-day percentage losses on October 19, 1987. Eventually known as Black Monday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped nearly 23% on the session. With that kind of sudden sell off, everyone involved in the markets at the time, flashing back to vague memories of 1929 and the Great Depression, got pretty scared.

So the PPT was born. President Ronald Reagan put together a crack team to look into the situation. He formed what was officially called the President’s Working Group on Financial Markets (a newspaper later dubbed it the Plunge Protection Team). The team, which is still in existence, doesn't have any official regulatory athority. Instead, it was meant to gather information and provide advice about how to protect markets and maintain investor confidence.

The team consists of the Treasury Secretary, the Chair of the Fed's Board of Governors, the Chair of the SEC, and the Chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.