Nikkei 225 · March 9, 2020
The day oil broke and the world fell together
-5.07%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The COVID crash
near the end of it · 2020-01-20 → 2020-03-19, -31.27% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nikkei 225 fell 5.07% on the day
- Over the weekend talks among oil producers on cutting output collapsed. Saudi Arabia announced higher output and lower prices instead, and oil fell close to a third in a single day
- Cheaper oil is normally good news for an importing country like Japan. That day it was read the other way
- A price falling for want of demand is a signal that the economy is breaking, and with the world shutting down for the pandemic that is how it was read
- The yen also strengthened sharply the same day. The way the yen rises in a crisis is a double blow for Japanese exporters
- The decline ran to 19 March
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.