WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · May 7, 2001

Two months on a new prime minister

+22.93%

trough back to the old high

35 trading days · 2001-03-13 → 2001-05-07

this undid the slide that began 2000-12-15

What happened that day?

  • From the low on 13 March 2001 to the high on 7 May, the Nikkei rose 22.93% over 35 trading days
  • A prime minister campaigning on reform took office that April, with very high approval
  • 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 Bank of Japan also began quantitative easing in March — with no room left to cut, it increased the quantity of money instead
  • Reform takes time, though. The September attacks in the US pushed the index back down
  • 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.