October 31, 1978 – CBS World News Roundup – WCBS-New York – Gordon Skene Sound Collection –
Last day of October and a particularly busy one in 1978.
They were calling it the October Massacre on Wall Street — a devastating market decline that cut the paper value of stocks by well over $100 billion in just a little more than two weeks By late Monday analysts had begun comparing it to the other great market debacles of this century — the 1962 showdown between President Kennedy and the steel industry over prices the fall of France in the early days of World War II and even the Crash of 1929 which led to a drop of some 80 percent in stock prices and the Great Depression The recent selloff hasn’t reached crash proportions But from mid-October through Monday noon the Dow Jones industrial average fell more than 11 percent from 897 points to below 800. By Tuesday there was a rally (of sorts) before diving again. Observers predicted this massacre was far from over.
Meanwhile, Sources close to the negotiations predicted Israel and Egypt would sign a peace treaty soon, perhaps Dec 10 in Oslo Norway when Prime Minister Menachem Begin and President Anwar Sadat receive the Nobel Peace Prize the Egyptian ambassador to the United States said Monday. “That is one of the ideas floating around, Oslo has its attractiveness”. Ambassador Ashrat Ghorbal said The ambassador made his prediction as representatives of Egypt, Israel and the United States resumed three-way talks in Washington. Ghorbal and Simcha Dinitz Israeli ambassador to the United States appeared at a news conference with William Crawford assistant deputy secretary of state before an awards dinner in Detroit. Crawford said peace between Egypt and Israel was “now quite close” and agreements could be completed by mid-December. Fingers crossed.
And Iran’s political turmoil shut down the nation’s $20 billion-a-year oil industry, Idling some of the largest oilfields in the world and cutting off natural gas supplies to the Soviet Union. Wildcat strikes in Iran’s oil-producing region threatened to dry up that country’s economic lifeline of oil exports, on which the United States and other nations depend, but the government said it has been able so far to maintain 60 percent of its export quota. The work stoppages in five major oil production cities in the south coincided with widespread riots and demonstrations against the shah in other parts of Iran that resulted in 11 new deaths Monday. All the victims were said to be demonstrators killed during a clash with security guards in the west Iranian town of Paveh.
And along with continuing reports from Wall Street, that’s just a little of what happened on this hectic Halloween in 1978 as reported by The CBS World News Roundup
