The 1980s unfolded as a dickens of a decade. Spells of the best of times would shift into spasms of the worst of times. Or vice versa. And best times for some — bankers, for instance, raking in all-time record rates of interest on loans — could be the very worst for others, such as borrowers, say, renewing mortgages.

The decade, which suffered a punishing recession in the early years and the closing of the Cold War in its upbeat final weeks, gained a name for many things along the way. One was the Inflated Eighties because "an inflationary psychology" helped push up prices by 82¢ on the dollar over 10 years. It was a helter-skelter decade of excess and enormities.

Much like nowadays, uncertainty then about the economy's next move bugged business and plagued consumers. But change then could lurch between enlarging wealth in some quarters and poverty in darker corners of the decade. The Reichmann brothers, for example, accumulated assets in property development that tallied to an estimated $15 billion. Fortunes three times as rich in total went down the toilet in six hours on the Toronto Stock Exchange in the record Black Monday crash of Oct. 19, 1987.

Today the bear's big growl means that the young Bay Street stars are saying farewell to the big commissions and fat profit shares and are facing up to the hard slogging they will need to do to restore investor confidence in the stock market....  In that spirit...Bay Street's young stars stepped over the gore on the TSE floor and got back to business. 

Then, as now, savers and investors sought safe havens for cash. Opportunities sometimes offered the best of both security and gain. Take Canada Savings Bonds Series 35, a seven-year borrowing by Ottawa in 1980. Year one paid 14.41%, year two 19.5%, year three 12%, the rest 10.5% per annum. The bond paid out $228 in 1987. True, inflation cut the spending power to about $138. But it was still lots better than Black Monday, or than present CSB returns that barely keep pace with inflation. The bond's early life coincided with the recession of 1981-1982, when the cost of credit screeched to all-time highs. The Bank of Canada's bellwether interest rate peaked at 21% in August 1981, while the prime rate at the chartered banks hit 22.75%.

Renewing a conventional mortgage? You could sign up for a one-year term at a bargain 150 basis points below prime — 21.25%. Five years? A discounted 21.75%. They had to be kidding. Those rates slid, but never below 9.75% until the 1990s. Nevertheless, a speculative real estate rush took off late in the decade.

Attempts to get a grip on rattled economies featured austerity crusades by Britain's Margaret Thatcher and America's Ronald Reagan. The theory that cutting both taxes and spending could balance the books and stimulate trickle-down prosperity became known as "voodoo economics." George Bush Sr. popularized the voodoo tag while seeking the Republican nomination just before he became Reagan's vice-presidential running mate.

Brian Mulroney, who built a buddy relationship with Reagan on White House visits both before and after becoming prime minister in September 1984, took a run at matching the Thatcher-Reagan approach. But that faltered a bit when diminutive citizen Solange Denis, 63, upbraided the prime minister for planning to curb cost-of-living increases in Old Age Security pensions in a highly publicized encounter on Parliament Hill in June 1985. "You made promises that you wouldn't touch anything and, hello, you lied to us," she scolded. As for voting for Mulroney, "It's goodbye, Charlie Brown," she added.

It was the kind of politics that clicked with the times. So did Mulroney's 1983 declaration on free trade with the United States while campaigning for the Tory party leadership that "it affects Canadian sovereignty and we will have none of it" — then going for it big time once in office.