WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · November 27, 1997

At the end of the week it broke

+3.48%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

When the banks themselves failed

midway through · 1996-06-26 → 1998-10-09, -43.18% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nikkei 225 rose 3.48% on the day
  • It followed a month in which a large bank and two brokerages had failed in turn — the month the assumption that big Japanese financial firms do not fail broke
  • The gain came on word that the government was considering putting public money into financial institutions
  • The money did not actually go in until the autumn of the following year. Through that year the market kept sliding
  • Japan's problem was always the time taken to admit things. Recognising the losses meant closing banks, so it was deferred
  • While it was deferred the banks could not make new loans, and the recovery was deferred with them

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.