Nikkei 225 · October 12, 1998
The day they agreed to nationalise banks
+5.24%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The IT rally
early in it · 1998-10-09 → 2000-04-12, +61.75% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nikkei 225 rose 5.24% on the day. The previous session, 9 October, had been the bottom of this phase
- Parliament agreed a law to nationalise failed banks and inject public money
- Japan's problem was banks refusing to admit their bad loans, because admitting them meant falling short of capital and closing
- So banks that were alive but unable to make new loans weighed on the whole economy. The word zombie came into use for them
- Public money unties that knot. Losses can be written off if the government refills the capital, and the bank can lend again
- The rebound that began at this bottom ran to April 2000, overlapping the world information-technology boom
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.