Nasdaq · September 18, 2008
The day Washington said it would buy the bad stuff
+4.78%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
A halving that took seventeen months
midway through · 2007-10-31 → 2009-03-09, -55.63% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nasdaq rose 4.78% to close at 2,199.10
- It was the third session after Lehman collapsed, in a week where every day was a crisis
- Late in the day, word spread that the US Treasury was preparing a plan to buy banks' bad assets outright
- The same day, major central banks expanded the arrangements that let them lend each other dollars — a move to stop dollar funding from drying up
- Britain banned short selling of financial shares and Washington followed shortly after, closing off bets on further falls
- Prices rose not because conditions had improved, but because a signal had arrived that the state would not stand back indefinitely
- The rebound did not hold. The bottom of this episode came two months later, in November
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 put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.