WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · April 18, 2001

The day the reform candidate pulled ahead

+4.40%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Two months on a new prime minister

midway through · 2001-03-13 → 2001-05-07, +22.93% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 18 April 2001 the Nikkei 225 rose 4.4%
  • It had become clear that the candidate running on reform was ahead in the party leadership race
  • His central promise was to finish cleaning up the bad loans and privatise state enterprises
  • The hope that a problem postponed for ten years might finally be handled lifted prices
  • The hope faded within a fortnight, though. Reform takes time and markets do not wait that long
  • In this stretch the index was 24.33% below its peak
  • The results only showed from 2003 onwards

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.