S&P 500 · May 4, 2010
The day Greece first became the problem
-2.38%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Europe's crisis and the flash crash
early in it · 2010-04-23 → 2010-07-02, -15.99% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The S&P 500 fell 2.38% on the day
- Europe and the IMF had agreed a Greek bailout over the weekend, and prices fell anyway
- What the market looked at was not Greece but who came next. Portugal, Spain and Ireland carried the same problem
- A country using the euro cannot print its own money. Even with heavy debt, the route of inflating the burden away is closed
- So rescuing one country did not end it. It moved to the next and ran for years
- Two days later, on 6 May, the flash crash hit the US — automated orders pushing each other down in a market already on edge
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.