WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · October 30, 2008

The surge right after the bottom

+9.96%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Japan's lost decades

near the end of it · 1989-12-29 → 2009-03-10, -81.87% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nikkei 225 rose 9.96% on the day
  • Three sessions earlier, on 27 October, it had bottomed for the financial crisis at its lowest level since 1982
  • The US Fed had cut rates and the Bank of Japan was expected to follow. Countries were moving together in this period
  • Japan was shaken unusually hard in this crisis because of the yen. Money fleeing risk crowded into it, the yen surged, and exporters' earnings forecasts collapsed
  • Its direct losses were smaller than those of US or European banks, yet its shares fell further. The crisis arrives twice
  • Days of ten percent moves in either direction ran through this period — the look of a market that has not chosen a direction

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.