Nikkei 225 · November 7, 1997
The November it started breaking
-4.22%
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 fell 4.22% on the day
- The currency crisis that began in Thailand that summer had spread across Asia. Hong Kong shares had already broken hard
- Japanese banks were among the heaviest lenders into south-east Asia. As those loans soured, books that were already bad got worse
- Japan's own problem was that bad property loans built up since 1990 had never been cleared
- The land taken as collateral kept getting cheaper, and the banks kept deferring rather than writing the losses off
- From the end of this month large financial firms failed one after another, and all that deferred arithmetic came due at once
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.