WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · May 17, 2012

The month Greece could not form a government

-2.10%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Spanish banks and a second Greek election

near the end of it · 2012-03-26 → 2012-06-01, -12.01% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nasdaq fell 2.1% on the day
  • Days earlier, coalition talks in Greece had collapsed after an election. A second vote was needed, and people began saying openly that the result might take Greece out of the euro
  • That same week Spain nationalised one of its large banks amid reports of deposits leaving
  • This was the stretch where the euro crisis moved for the first time from "which country cannot pay" to "does this currency survive"
  • US tech shares have nothing to do with Greek politics, but in stretches like this everything risky is sold as one basket
  • The correction ended in early June, and the story was settled in September by the ECB's bond-buying announcement

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.