WhyItDropped

Nasdaq · September 22, 2011

The day the Fed's move fell short

-3.25%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

Five months around a downgrade

near the end of it · 2011-04-29 → 2011-10-03, -18.71% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • The Nasdaq fell 3.25% on the day
  • The day before, the Fed had announced it would sell short-dated bonds and buy long-dated ones, aiming to pull long rates down
  • The method adds no money in total. The market had expected new money and got a rearrangement instead
  • The statement also said there were significant risks to the global outlook. When a central bank writes that, the market takes fright
  • Chinese manufacturing data was weak at the same time, forming a picture of the world cooling together
  • This phase bottomed some ten days later, on 3 October

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.