S&P 500 · March 23, 2009
The toxic asset plan
+7.08%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Eighty percent in a year off the bottom
early in it · 2009-03-09 → 2010-04-23, +79.93% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- On 23 March 2009 the S&P 500 rose 7.08% in a single day
- Two weeks earlier, on 9 March, the crisis decline had made its final low
- That day the US Treasury announced a plan to buy banks' bad assets alongside private investors
- Those assets could not be priced, so nobody would buy them and they sat on bank balance sheets
- By absorbing part of the loss, the government made private buyers willing to transact
- Once there was a path to cleaning up the banks, the market moved hard. The advance from here ran to the old high in March 2013
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.