Nasdaq · November 24, 2008
The day the government took on a giant bank
+6.33%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
A halving that took seventeen months
near the end of it · 2007-10-31 → 2009-03-09, -55.63% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nasdaq rose 6.33% on the day
- Over the weekend the US government agreed to absorb losses on one large bank's bad assets and inject capital
- This was a bank big enough that its failure would take the system with it, and the move amounted to admitting that
- It was the opposite of the choice made two months earlier when Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail. The market read a lot into the difference
- The next day the Fed said it would buy consumer and mortgage debt directly
- This was not the bottom, though. The index fell further into March of the next year
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.