KOSPI · September 23, 2011

The Greek default scare

-5.73%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The euro crisis and the US downgrade

near the end of it · 2011-05-02 → 2011-09-26, -25.85% over the whole period

What happened that day?

On 23 September 2011 the KOSPI fell 5.73% in a single day
Fear that Greece could not repay its debts was at its peak
Euro members cannot print their own currency, so one failure puts every other member's bonds under suspicion
European banks held those bonds in bulk, so it spread into worry about the banks themselves
Europe is a large export market for Korea, so weaker demand fed straight through, and foreign selling continued
This leg bottomed three days later on 26 September, and the old high took five and a half years to return

Sources

European debt crisis
Greek government-debt crisis

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.