WhyItDropped

KOSPI · September 7, 2012

The day after Europe said "unlimited, if needed"

+2.57%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Five months as central banks stepped in again

early in it · 2012-07-25 → 2013-01-02, +14.80% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The KOSPI rose 2.57% on the day
  • The evening before, the European Central Bank had said it would buy the government bonds of countries in trouble without a fixed limit if needed
  • Until then the core of the euro crisis had been the question of what happens if a country cannot pay. The question itself weakened once the central bank said it stood behind them
  • Almost no bonds were ever bought under the plan. It survives as the textbook case of **a policy that worked by being announced**
  • For Korea it signalled that the year's decline, half of which had been about Europe, was ending
  • The recovery ran through to the end of the year

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.