S&P 500 · August 4, 1998
The summer it became clear Asia was not over
-3.62%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Russia's default and LTCM
midway through · 1998-07-17 → 1998-08-31, -19.34% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The S&P 500 fell 3.62% on the day
- **No single cause for that day has been pinned down.** What is established is that it sat at the start of a six-week decline
- The Asian crisis that began in Thailand the previous summer had still not been resolved by the summer of 1998, and Japan's economy was going backwards
- This was the period when US companies started writing lost Asian sales into their earnings explanations — somebody else's problem arriving as your own number
- The stretch ran on into Russia's default over six weeks
- Recovery began after the Fed cut rates three times
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.