KOSPI · October 5, 1999
The Daewoo collapse
-23.00%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
60 trading days · 1999-07-09 → 1999-10-05
back to the old high on 1999-12-28
What happened that day?
- From the 9 July 1999 peak to the 5 October low the KOSPI fell 23% — 60 trading days
- Just as the country was climbing out of the IMF crisis, it emerged that the Daewoo group could not service its debts
- Daewoo was the second-largest conglomerate in Korea at the time. The scale of the borrowing shook the whole financial sector
- Investment trust products holding large amounts of Daewoo paper faced a wave of redemption demands
- Ordinary savers discovered the funds they had bought were stuffed with bad debt, and trust collapsed
- The government set up a bond market stabilisation fund and things settled. The old high returned on 28 December
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.