WhyItDropped

KOSPI · May 18, 2012

The May Greece might leave the euro

-3.40%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Four months as Europe's crisis returned

midway through · 2012-04-03 → 2012-07-25, -13.66% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The KOSPI fell 3.4% on the day, the largest single-day drop of this decline
  • Greece had failed to form a government after its May election and had to vote again in June. For the first time, leaving the euro was discussed seriously
  • In the same period Spain's government took over one of its banks over bad property loans — the structure in which a country rescuing its banks endangers itself
  • Korea falls hard on this through money flows rather than trade. European banks call in their Asian loans first
  • Foreign investors sold heavily in this period and the won weakened
  • 25 July was the bottom, and days later a remark from the ECB president changed the board

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.