Nikkei 225 · March 19, 1990
The eve of a rate hike
-4.15%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The bubble's first leg down
early in it · 1989-12-29 → 1990-10-01, -48.04% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 19 March 1990 the Nikkei 225 fell 4.15%
- The next day the Bank of Japan raised its discount rate again — the fifth increase since May 1989
- The market read the move in advance and priced it a day early. Expectation sets the price, not the announcement
- The reason for the hikes was land. Share prices alone might have been tolerated; land prices had escaped control
- In this stretch the index was 28.04% below its peak
- One more rise that August took the rate to six percent
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.