KOSPI · August 20, 1998
A bounce three days after the Russian default
+4.87%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Korea's post-IMF rebound
early in it · 1998-06-16 → 1999-04-27, +183.56% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 20 August 1998 — the KOSPI rose 4.87% to close at 316.59. No single cause can be pinned to the day
- Three days earlier Russia had declared it could not pay its debts. The KOSPI dropped on the next session and then took it back over two days
- Korea had already bottomed that spring. When few sellers are left, a small piece of news moves the index a long way
- The government was in the middle of winding up failed banks and companies. The terms of the money coming in from abroad depended on it
- Russia and Korea sat in the same basket of emerging markets. Money leaving one tended to leave the other
- But most of the money that was going to leave had already left. Unlike the autumn of 1997, the reaction lasted a day or two
- From the late-April high to the 16 June low the index fell 35.16%
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.