WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · June 4, 2010

The month only the government hired

-3.44%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Europe's crisis and the flash crash

midway through · 2010-04-23 → 2010-07-02, -15.99% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 4 June 2010 the S&P 500 fell 3.44%
  • The May jobs report that morning showed a large increase in employment
  • But most of the increase was temporary government hiring for the census
  • Private sector job creation was very small. Once the census ended, those jobs would disappear
  • By the headline it was a good number; by the contents it was a bad one. The market read the contents
  • Hungarian fiscal worries landed the same week, deepening the fall
  • In this stretch the index was 15.99% below its peak

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.