Nikkei 225 · March 24, 2020
The day the Olympics were postponed
+7.13%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
From the COVID low to a 30-year high
early in it · 2020-03-19 → 2021-09-14, +85.29% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nikkei 225 rose 7.13% on the day. The previous session, 19 March, had been the bottom of this crash
- Japan and the International Olympic Committee agreed that day to postpone the Tokyo Games by a year
- A postponement reading as good news looks odd until you remember that cancellation had been the live possibility. Cancelling and postponing are different in scale
- It meant the venues already built and the tickets already sold would still be used, cutting the estimated losses in construction, tourism and advertising sharply
- It also came as the US announced unlimited asset purchases and governments everywhere moved to large support packages
- The recovery that began here ran to September 2021, carrying the Nikkei to a thirty-year high
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.