WhyItDropped

KOSPI · November 27, 2009

The day Dubai asked to delay

-4.69%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Two months when the recovery paused

near the end of it · 2009-09-22 → 2009-11-27, -11.31% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The KOSPI fell 4.69% on the day — the bottom of this correction
  • It emerged that Dubai's state-owned developer had asked to delay repaying its debt by six months
  • The amount was not large in global finance. What mattered was the demonstration that even a company with a state behind it might not pay
  • It signalled the crisis moving from banks to countries, a shift that broke far more violently in Greece the following year
  • Korea's direct dealings with Dubai were small, but its construction firms depended heavily on Middle Eastern contracts and were pushed down with it
  • The correction ended in two months and the recovery resumed

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.