KOSPI · September 26, 2011
The euro crisis and the US downgrade
-25.85%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
99 trading days · 2011-05-02 → 2011-09-26
back to the old high on 2017-05-04
What happened that day?
- From the May 2011 peak to the September low the KOSPI fell 25.85% — 99 trading days
- In August 2011 a rating agency cut the US government's credit rating for the first time ever — the asset everyone treated as the safest there is
- At the same time southern European countries, starting with Greece, ran into fiscal trouble. Euro members are tied to each other, so one wobble shakes all of them
- Europe is a large export market for Korea, so the prospect of weaker demand fed straight through
- As in every crisis, foreign investors sold emerging-market shares first, which deepened the fall
- The recovery was very slow. The old high did not return until 4 May 2017 — five and a half 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.