Nikkei 225 · June 28, 2002
Two days after the accounting shock (Tokyo)
+3.51%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The twenty-year low
early in it · 2002-05-23 → 2003-04-28, -36.49% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 28 June 2002 — the Nikkei 225 rose 3.51% to close at 10,621.84. No single cause can be pinned to the day
- Two sessions earlier Tokyo had fallen hard on news of accounting fraud at a large American telecom. This was the second day of taking it back
- Why that news reached Tokyo is simple: if American corporate numbers cannot be trusted, neither can the outlook for American demand
- Japanese exports stood on that demand, so an American accounting problem became a Japanese earnings problem
- It was also the last trading day of the first quarter of Japan's fiscal year, which stacks book-tidying trades onto the same session
- From late May to 10 October the index fell 29.55% over this episode
- Tokyo's own bottom came later still, in November
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.