WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · April 10, 1992

Hopes for a share-price package

+7.55%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

When the bad loans surfaced

near the end of it · 1991-03-18 → 1992-08-18, -47.29% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 10 April 1992 the Nikkei 225 rose 7.55% in a single day
  • Three years into the collapse, falling share prices were spreading into the banking system
  • Japanese banks held large equity stakes in other companies, so a falling market cut bank capital directly
  • Less capital meant less lending, which made the economy worse — a loop
  • So news that the government was merely considering measures to support the market produced a large bounce
  • Measures came repeatedly, but the underlying problem — cleaning up bad loans — kept being postponed

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.