Nikkei 225 · September 16, 2008
Tokyo reopened three days late
-4.95%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The Lehman collapse
near the end of it · 2008-06-06 → 2008-10-27, -50.56% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nikkei fell 4.95% to close at 11,609.72
- Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy the day before, on 15 September. Tokyo was shut that day for Respect for the Aged Day
- So this session absorbed three days of news at once — the last trading day had been Friday the 12th
- Lehman was one of the largest investment banks in the United States. The real news was that the government would not rescue it
- Assets priced on the assumption of a rescue were all repriced at once
- Japanese banks and insurers disclosed their own Lehman-linked losses over the following weeks
- The bottom of this episode was still far off. The index kept falling into late October
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 put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.