WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · June 21, 2021

The dots moved forward

-3.29%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

From the COVID low to a 30-year high

near the end of it · 2020-03-19 → 2021-09-14, +85.29% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 21 June 2021 the Nikkei 225 fell 3.29%
  • At the Fed meeting a week earlier, officials had pulled forward the timing of expected rate rises
  • The Fed publishes each official's forecast as a dot. Those dots simply moved up, and the market reacted hard
  • No rate was raised. Only the thinking about when changed — and prices moved anyway
  • A low interest rate was what held the post-COVID market up, so shaking that premise slightly shook everything
  • In this stretch the index was 10.6% below its peak
  • The actual rise came nine months later, in March 2022

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.