Nikkei 225 · August 17, 2007
The First Subprime Shock — Nikkei
-5.42%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Subprime reaches Tokyo
early in it · 2007-07-09 → 2008-03-17, -35.45% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 17 August 2007 — Nikkei 225 fell 5.42%, in the week the subprime problem first shook global markets
- What made this painful in Japan was the yen carry trade
- Japanese rates were then the lowest in the world, and a large volume of borrowed yen sat in assets abroad
- As risk aversion rose, those positions began to close
- Selling assets to buy yen back pushed the yen sharply higher → worsening the outlook for Japanese exporters
- The same mechanism as August 2024, already operating seventeen years earlier
- Fell 18.75% from 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.