WhyItDropped

KOSPI · June 12, 1998

The Bottom of the Currency Crisis

-8.10%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Korea's IMF crisis

near the end of it · 1997-06-17 → 1998-06-16, -64.66% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • 12 June 1998 — KOSPI fell 8.1%, six months after the IMF bailout
  • The high rates and restructuring required as conditions were now fully in effect
  • With rates high, indebted companies couldn't hold on. Failures followed, unemployment spiked, consumption collapsed
  • What the market reacted to were these real-economy readings — currency crisis to corporate crisis to employment crisis, showing up in the data
  • Fell 51.25% from peak, third-deepest on this list
  • This was effectively the bottom, and the market recovered quickly afterwards

Sources

Every figure on this page is recomputed from the original daily closing prices and checked against them at build time. The account of what happened is written from the sources listed above.