Nikkei 225 · March 2, 2009

Eight days before the bottom

-3.81%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Japan's lost decades

near the end of it · 1989-12-29 → 2009-03-10, -81.87% over the whole period

What happened that day?

2 March 2009 — the Nikkei 225 fell 3.81%. No single cause for that one day could be pinned down
By this point the problem was the real economy, not finance. World demand had stopped and Japanese exports collapsed
Nationalisation of American banks was still being discussed, and weekend news reached Asia first on the Monday
The steepest stretch usually comes right before a bottom, when the ones still holding give up
The episode low came eight days later, on 10 March — the lowest close since the bubble burst
From the November 2008 high to the March 2009 low the index fell 25.90%

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.