KOSPI · October 24, 2008
Global Financial Crisis — KOSPI
-10.57%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Four months of testing the bottom twice
early in it · 2008-10-24 → 2009-03-02, +8.53% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 24 October 2008 — KOSPI fell 10.57%
- Even though subprime was an American problem and Korean banks had almost no exposure
- The reason was how money moves. In a crisis, global investors pull out of emerging markets first
- Not because they're riskier, but because they're easier to sell: when you take losses at home, you liquidate what's liquid
- The won fell sharply at the same time, so foreign investors' losses exceeded the index decline — triggering further selling
- Fell 47.09% from peak
- Korea reacted with particular sensitivity to reserves and the exchange rate, because 1997 was still in living memory
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.