WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · September 29, 2008

Bailout Rejected — Nasdaq

-9.14%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

A halving that took seventeen months

near the end of it · 2007-10-31 → 2009-03-09, -55.63% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • 29 September 2008 — the US House voted down a $700bn bank rescue
  • Prices collapsed in real time as the tally came in. Nasdaq down 9.14%
  • Two weeks after Lehman failed. Markets had assumed the government would intervene somehow; that assumption broke within hours
  • That a tech-heavy index reacted so violently to a banking bill showed the problem had already spread beyond finance
  • When funding markets freeze, every company is affected regardless of sector
  • A revised bill passed days later, but the decline didn't stop
  • Fell 50.25% from peak

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.