S&P 500 · October 15, 2008
Global Financial Crisis — S&P 500
-9.03%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The Global Financial Crisis bear market
near the end of it · 2007-10-09 → 2009-03-09, -56.78% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 15 October 2008 — S&P 500 fell 9.03%. Eleven sessions in this stretch cleared the detection threshold
- What stands out: governments and central banks had already intervened. Bailout passed, rates cut, deposit guarantees raised
- Markets fell anyway — not because policy was too small, but because banks didn't believe each other's balance sheets
- Nobody knew who held how much bad paper → everyone hoarded cash and lent to no one
- With credit frozen, even healthy companies couldn't fund themselves
- Fell 51.82% from peak — deepest since the Great Depression, taking more than five years to recover
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.