Nikkei 225 · March 17, 2008
Subprime reaches Tokyo
-35.45%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
168 trading days · 2007-07-09 → 2008-03-17
back to the old high on 2015-02-19
What happened that day?
- From the high on 9 July 2007 to the low on 17 March 2008, the Nikkei fell 35.45% over 168 trading days
- It began in the US, where mortgages written to borrowers who could not repay turned bad
- Those loans had been sliced up and sold into financial institutions worldwide, so it stopped being an American problem
- Japan held little of that paper and still fell hard. The reason lay elsewhere
- When money reduces risk, the yen gets dearer, because the trade of borrowing cheap yen unwinds
- A dearer yen shrinks Japanese exporters' profits. That is why Tokyo fell further
- The high it fell from was not regained until February 2015
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.