S&P 500 · February 5, 2008
The winter the insurers wobbled
-3.20%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The Global Financial Crisis bear market
early in it · 2007-10-09 → 2009-03-09, -56.78% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 5 February 2008 the S&P 500 fell 3.2%
- A services sector reading that morning fell sharply. Services are far larger than manufacturing, so it landed hard
- At the same time there was talk that bond insurers might be downgraded
- Those firms had guaranteed bad debt. If the guarantee failed, the losses at the banks holding it grew again
- From here the structure of the crisis — spreading from one place to the next — became clear
- No single trigger can be pinned to this day
- In this stretch the index was 18.64% 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.