S&P 500 · October 30, 2009
Autumn, asking if the consumer would hold
-2.81%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Eighty percent in a year off the bottom
midway through · 2009-03-09 → 2010-04-23, +79.93% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 30 October 2009 the S&P 500 fell 2.81%
- A consumer spending reading that day was weak, in the wake of a car-scrappage subsidy ending
- Consumption is a large part of the US economy. The question was what remained once policy-created demand stopped
- Unemployment passed ten percent that month, near its peak
- No single trigger can be pinned to this day
- The dip was only 5.62% from the peak and the index soon rose again
- Whether a policy-made recovery could stand without policy was the question of the next several years
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.