S&P 500 · October 3, 1974
The 1973–74 oil shock bear market
-48.20%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
436 trading days · 1973-01-11 → 1974-10-03
back to the old high on 1980-07-17
What happened that day?
- From the January 1973 peak to the October 1974 low the S&P 500 fell 48.2% — 436 trading days
- War broke out in the Middle East in October 1973 and Arab producers cut off oil exports to the US and others
- Crude quadrupled within months. Queues formed at filling stations and some countries went to rationing
- Oil goes into making and moving almost everything, so when it jumps, everything else follows
- Prices rose while the economy shrank. There was no theory for that combination at the time, which is when the word stagflation came into wide use
- The old high did not return until July 1980
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.