WhyItDropped

KOSPI · July 23, 1999

The Daewoo Group Crisis

-7.34%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The Daewoo collapse

early in it · 1999-07-09 → 1999-10-05, -23.00% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • 23 July 1999 — KOSPI fell 7.34% as the Daewoo Group's funding problems surfaced
  • Daewoo was among the largest business groups in Korea, expanded through aggressive borrowing
  • After the IMF crisis, sustained high rates and tight credit made that structure impossible to hold
  • What alarmed markets was scale. A group that size failing cascades losses to suppliers and lenders
  • Investment trusts holding large amounts of Daewoo paper faced a wave of redemptions, tightening funding markets again
  • Fell 23% from peak. Showed the aftershocks of the IMF crisis weren't finished

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.