WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · May 10, 2010

The day Europe built a rescue fund

+4.40%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Europe's crisis and the flash crash

early in it · 2010-04-23 → 2010-07-02, -15.99% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 10 May 2010 the S&P 500 rose 4.4%
  • Over the weekend the EU and the IMF had agreed to create a large rescue fund
  • The European Central Bank also said it would start buying member states' bonds, which it had never done
  • It read as a commitment to defend the euro itself, not just Greece
  • Coming right after the flash crash, the retrace was large
  • The agreement did not end the problem. Europe's crisis ran for two more years
  • The index sat 15.99% below its peak in this stretch

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.