S&P 500 · August 9, 2007
The day the credit crunch started
-2.96%
single-day change vs previous close
What happened that day?
- On 9 August 2007 the S&P 500 fell 2.96%
- BNP Paribas froze withdrawals from three of its funds — funds holding US mortgage debt
- The reason was the alarming part. The bank said it could not put a price on them, because the buyers had disappeared
- Banks began doubting each other. Nobody knew who held how much, so even overnight lending dried up
- The European Central Bank pushed emergency cash into the system that same day, on a scale it normally never uses
- Many date the credit crunch from here. Lehman Brothers followed a year later
- From the July peak the index was down 9.43% before it turned
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.