WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · March 22, 2019

The day the yield curve inverted

-2.50%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The Nasdaq's Fed-pivot rebound

near the end of it · 2018-12-24 → 2019-04-23, +31.13% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nasdaq fell 2.5% on the day
  • In the US, the ten-year government bond yield fell below the three-month rate for the first time since 2007
  • Normally lending for longer earns more. An inversion means the market expects the economy to weaken
  • The signal draws attention because it has appeared before almost every past recession. But the gap between the signal and the recession can exceed a year
  • European manufacturing data was also weak the same day
  • A US recession did arrive the following year, though its cause was the pandemic rather than rates

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.