Nikkei 225 · January 23, 1995
The Kobe Earthquake
-5.60%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The Kobe quake and a record yen
midway through · 1994-06-13 → 1995-07-03, -32.79% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- A major earthquake struck the Kobe area on 17 January 1995. The Nikkei's large drop came six days later, on 23 January: −5.6%
- Kobe was one of Japan's largest ports and a logistics hub
- The market reacted as reconstruction costs and interrupted activity emerged over several days
- Insurers fell hardest, because the size of the claims was hard to estimate
- At the same time, expectations that institutions would sell foreign assets and repatriate yen for rebuilding pushed the yen higher → an extra burden on exporters
- Fell 23.66% from peak
- Japan was then attempting to recover from its bubble bursting, and the earthquake interrupted that again
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.