S&P 500 · August 9, 2011
Bouncing after the downgrade
+4.74%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The downgrade and Europe's second wave
midway through · 2011-04-29 → 2011-10-03, -19.39% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 9 August 2011 the S&P 500 rose 4.74% in a single day
- Days earlier a rating agency had cut the US government's credit rating for the first time ever and the market had crashed
- That day the Fed said it would hold rates low through mid-2013 — unusually, naming a date
- Until then it had used vague phrasing like for some time. Specifying a horizon was new
- Knowing how long rates will stay low lets companies and investors plan, which is why the reaction was large
- The European debt crisis kept going, though, and markets swung hard into that autumn
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.