S&P 500 · May 18, 2022
What the retailers' results showed
-4.04%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The 2022 inflation bear market
midway through · 2022-01-03 → 2022-10-12, -25.43% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 18 May 2022 the S&P 500 fell 4.04% — its worst day since June 2020
- Over two days, two large US retailers reported profits crushed by costs
- Sales were not the problem. Freight, wages and unsold inventory were
- It mattered because it was the first hard evidence that inflation was eating corporate profits directly
- Until then the market had treated inflation purely as a rate problem. From this day it was an earnings problem too
- It also showed consumers shifting their spending from goods to services
- In this stretch the index was 20.83% below its peak
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.