WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · March 29, 2001

Dot-com Bust Meets Bank Debt

-5.04%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Two months on a new prime minister

early in it · 2001-03-13 → 2001-05-07, +22.93% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • 29 March 2001 — Nikkei 225 fell 5.04%, near the fiscal year end
  • Japanese banks counted shareholdings toward their capital
  • Falling prices reduced bank capital → forced loans to be called → starved companies of funding
  • The channel from share prices into the real economy was more direct than elsewhere
  • The global tech decline compounded it; Japan's electronics and telecom firms were in the same current
  • Fell 23.46% from peak
  • This is when the Bank of Japan first introduced a new policy called quantitative easing

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.