Nasdaq · July 24, 2002
The day the accounting law passed
+4.98%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Nine months when the books could not be trusted
near the end of it · 2002-01-04 → 2002-10-09, -45.90% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nasdaq rose 4.98% on the day
- Congress agreed a bill to prevent accounting fraud, requiring executives to sign the financial statements personally and answer for them
- It created a new body to oversee auditors and barred one firm from both auditing and consulting for the same client
- It came four months after the frauds were exposed, following two enormous cases in half a year
- A law does not restore trust at once. But it did confirm that the rules were changing
- Falls began to shrink from around this time, and the bottom came three months later
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.