KOSPI · January 21, 1998

Giving back the jump from two days earlier

-5.04%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Korea's IMF crisis

midway through · 1997-06-17 → 1998-06-16, -64.66% over the whole period

What happened that day?

21 January 1998 — the KOSPI fell 5.04%. No single cause for that one day could be pinned down
Two sessions earlier the index had jumped sharply on news of progress in the foreign-debt talks with international banks
That was the shape of this market: a big rise on one piece of negotiation news, and as much given back when the hope cooled
It fell again the next day and rose sharply the following week. A stretch with no direction
From the late-September 1997 high to the December low the index fell 46.52%
The real bottom of the crisis was that June. January was still the middle of it

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.