Nikkei 225 · December 17, 1997
The day a tax cut was promised
+3.48%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
When the banks themselves failed
midway through · 1996-06-26 → 1998-10-09, -43.18% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 17 December 1997 the Nikkei 225 rose 3.48%
- The government announced an income tax cut of two trillion yen that day
- Having raised the consumption tax in April and broken the recovery, it was now reversing course at year end
- A month earlier a major securities house and a bank had closed, and alarm was at its peak
- The market read it as the government finally moving
- A tax cut does not make bad loans disappear, though. Public money for the banks was only decided the following autumn
- In this stretch the index was 24.12% below its 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.