KOSPI · August 7, 2019
Eighteen months under the trade war
-26.50%
peak-to-trough, the whole slide
373 trading days · 2018-01-29 → 2019-08-07
still below that peak today
What happened that day?
- From the high on 29 January 2018 to the low on 7 August 2019, the KOSPI fell 26.5% over 373 trading days
- The backdrop was the US and China beginning to impose tariffs on each other
- Korea sits structurally in between. It sells intermediate goods to China, and China sells the finished products to the US
- So orders fall even when tariffs do not target Korea directly
- Memory prices dropped sharply at the same time. The boom of 2017 ended and prices roughly halved
- In the summer of 2019 Japan restricted exports of chipmaking materials, pressing shares down once more
- The index shed more than a quarter across these eighteen months, and the recovery that followed did not last six
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.