Nasdaq · August 8, 2011
The US Credit Downgrade — Nasdaq
-6.90%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
Five months around a downgrade
midway through · 2011-04-29 → 2011-10-03, -18.71% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 8 August 2011 — Nasdaq Composite fell 6.9%. The US downgrade was the trigger, but Europe was the backdrop
- Government bond yields in Greece, Italy and Spain were spiking, and whether the euro zone could hold together was an open question
- What defined this episode was confidence in government debt wobbling on both sides of the Atlantic at once
- Tech companies were financially healthy, but that didn't matter
- In a crisis, whether something is a risk asset matters before the condition of any individual company
- Fell 18.71% from peak. The episode resolved once the ECB made its willingness to intervene explicit the following year
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.