WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · September 22, 2003

Pushed back by a stronger yen

-4.24%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Four years off the bottom

early in it · 2003-04-28 → 2007-07-09, +140.04% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nikkei 225 fell 4.24% on the day
  • Over the weekend the finance ministers of the major economies issued a statement that exchange rates should be set by markets
  • Japan had until then intervened to hold the yen down whenever it rose. The statement was read as pressure to stop
  • The yen strengthened sharply right after it, and exporters' shares fell first
  • 2003 was the year the Nikkei was recovering off its bottom, and because that recovery rested on export earnings, a single currency move shook it hard
  • The fall lasted only weeks, though, and the recovery ran on to 2007

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.