KOSPI · March 23, 2018
The day the trade war began
-3.18%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Eighteen months under the trade war
early in it · 2018-01-29 → 2019-08-07, -26.50% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The KOSPI fell 3.18% on the day
- The US announced large tariffs on Chinese goods and China immediately signalled retaliation
- Korea sits structurally between the two: it sells intermediate goods to China, and China sells the finished goods to America
- Even when tariffs do not target Korea, orders for those intermediate goods fall first once the flow shrinks
- The decline that began here ran to August 2019, with falling memory prices arriving alongside
- The KOSPI lost more than a quarter across that stretch
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.