WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · December 8, 2000

The day the Fed looked ready to turn

+5.99%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Nine months down without a rest

midway through · 2000-07-17 → 2001-04-04, -61.66% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nasdaq rose 5.99% on the day
  • In a speech days earlier the Fed chair had said the economy was cooling noticeably, read as a signal that cuts might be coming
  • Rates had pressed on the market all year, so the mere prospect of that reversing produced a large gain
  • Days of five percent or more on cut expectations repeated through this period
  • Yet the decline did not stop once cutting actually began, because the problem was no longer rates
  • When there is already too much capacity, cheap money does not make anyone buy more

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.