S&P 500 · March 9, 2009
The Global Financial Crisis bear market
-56.78%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
355 trading days · 2007-10-09 → 2009-03-09
back to the old high on 2013-03-28
What happened that day?
- From the October 2007 peak to the March 2009 low the S&P 500 fell 56.78% — 355 trading days of it
- It started with US house prices. Loans went to buyers who could not repay, and while prices rose nobody noticed
- Those loans were sliced up and repackaged as bonds that ended up on bank balance sheets worldwide. When prices turned, the bonds turned with them
- Nobody knew who was holding what, so banks stopped lending to each other. Lehman Brothers failed in September 2008 and the panic peaked
- It stopped only when Washington put public money into the banks and the Fed cut rates to near zero
- Getting back to the old high took until March 2013 — four more 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.