WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · May 18, 2012

The day Europe's third wave reached Tokyo

-2.99%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Europe's third wave

near the end of it · 2012-03-27 → 2012-06-04, -19.11% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nikkei 225 fell 2.99% on the day
  • With Greece heading to a second election, leaving the euro was being discussed seriously for the first time
  • The route to Japan runs through the yen. Money fleeing risk crowds into it, the yen strengthens, and exporters' earnings outlook worsens
  • The larger Europe's crisis, the stronger Japan's currency — so Japan is hit twice by somebody else's crisis
  • The Nikkei lost close to a fifth in two months in this period
  • 4 June was the bottom, and the ECB president's remark changed the board that summer

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.