WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · January 8, 1991

A week from the war deadline

-3.53%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The first bounce

midway through · 1990-10-01 → 1991-03-18, +34.25% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 8 January 1991 the Nikkei 225 fell 3.53%
  • The UN deadline for Iraq to withdraw was 15 January — a week away
  • If war came, nobody knew how far oil would go. For a country that imports all of it, that was a direct problem
  • What a market handles worst is not bad news but not knowing
  • In this stretch the index was 13.77% below its peak
  • Once the war actually started, it rose sharply

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.