WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · April 2, 2009

The day the world agreed to act together

+4.40%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

A year off the crisis low

early in it · 2009-03-10 → 2010-04-05, +60.73% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 2 April 2009 the Nikkei 225 rose 4.4%
  • A summit of the major economies met in London that day and agreed to respond to the crisis together
  • They greatly expanded IMF resources, pledged not to turn protectionist, and committed to fiscal spending
  • One reason the 1930s depression ran so long was that countries acted alone. This avoided repeating that
  • The fact of acting together lifted prices by itself. What a market fears most in a crisis is that nobody steps forward
  • In this stretch the index was 23.64% below its peak
  • From around here world markets entered a genuine recovery

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.