Nikkei 225 · June 16, 2020
The day the Fed said it would buy corporate bonds
+4.88%
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?
- On 16 June 2020 the Nikkei 225 rose 4.88%
- Overnight the US Fed had announced it would buy individual corporate bonds directly
- A central bank buying company debt rather than government debt is unusual. It read as a promise that firms would not be allowed to fail
- It more than reversed the previous day's fall on second-wave fears, in a single session
- This is the defining feature of the period: central bank moves set prices, not infection news
- It is also why prices rose while the economy worsened — the worse it got, the more was supplied
- In this stretch the index was 29.63% 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.