WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · August 24, 2015

Black Monday, from China

-4.61%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The China shock

midway through · 2015-06-24 → 2015-09-29, -18.87% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 24 August 2015 the Nikkei 225 fell 4.61%
  • Shanghai collapsed that day, as shares individuals had bought with borrowed money were force-sold
  • It began two weeks earlier when China devalued the yuan without warning, read as a sign its economy was worse than admitted
  • China is Japan's largest trading partner, so machinery, materials and chemicals took it directly
  • Money reducing risk also crowded into the yen, squeezing Japan a second way
  • US markets fell hard at the open the same day. The whole world moved together
  • In this stretch the index was 18.87% below its 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.