His work on the White House response to the 1987 stock market crash included the formation of the Presidential Task Force on Market Mechanisms and the recruitment of Harvard Business School professor Robert Glauber, who had been Cox's department chairman during his stint on the faculty there, as its executive director. The Commission provided the definitive autopsy on what happened to the markets on Black Monday, October 19, 1987, and its aftermath. Coincidentally, eight months prior to the crash, Chief of Staff Howard Baker had asked Cox to write a detailed memo describing the emergency powers that the President might exercise in a market crisis. That landed Cox in an emergency meeting in the Chief of Staff’s office on Black Monday, from which Baker called then-NYSE Chairman John Phelan to urge him to drop his plan to shut down the New York Stock Exchange.