WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · August 2, 1996

Where the correction ended after two months

+2.37%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The autumn 1996 recovery

early in it · 1996-07-24 → 1996-10-07, +20.00% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nasdaq rose 2.37% on the day. 24 July had been the bottom of this correction
  • The jobs report came in strong enough but not so strong as to stoke inflation — the combination that lets the Fed leave rates alone
  • The US economy at this point grew without prices rising. It later came to be called the new economy
  • The explanation offered was that productivity gains were holding inflation down, and that became the argument for paying more for shares
  • The logic was partly right. The problem was that prices ran far ahead of it
  • The advance that began here ran, through several corrections, to March 2000

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.