Nasdaq · September 18, 2007
The day the Fed cut half a point
+2.71%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Fifteen months that ran right up to the crisis
near the end of it · 2006-07-21 → 2007-10-31, +41.51% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nasdaq rose 2.71% on the day
- The Fed cut its policy rate by half a point at once. The market had expected half that
- It was the first cut in four years, reversing a direction that had only gone up for more than two
- The message mattered more than the size. Cutting large says the situation is judged serious, and also that they will not stand back
- The cut carried the Nasdaq into late October and its last high before the crisis
- But lower rates did not fix banks refusing to lend to each other. That was a problem of trust, not of price
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.