Nikkei 225 · March 16, 2011
The day the reactor situation worsened
+5.68%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Japan's 34-year climb back
early in it · 2009-03-10 → 2024-02-22, +454.20% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nikkei 225 moved 5.68% on the day. The previous session, 15 March, had been the bottom of this crash
- What moved the market in this period was the Fukushima reactors rather than the earthquake itself. The worst case kept being revised upward day by day
- It was a state in which nothing could be priced. Nobody knew how far radioactive material would spread, or whether it would reach the capital region
- Power shortages limited factory output and broke parts supply chains, reaching manufacturers abroad that had looked unconnected to Japan
- The Bank of Japan supplied a record amount of funds, and the major economies intervened together to hold the yen down
- The index recovered over the following months, but the accident's effects lingered for years through energy policy
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.