Nikkei 225 · June 26, 2002
The morning after WorldCom
-4.02%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
The twenty-year low
early in it · 2002-05-23 → 2003-04-28, -36.49% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- 26 June 2002 — the Nikkei 225 fell 4.02%
- After the US close the night before, a large telecom was revealed to have booked billions of dollars of costs as if they were profit
- Tokyo was the first market to get the news. The disclosure came at night in America; the reaction came in the Asian morning
- That year's problem was not one company. An energy firm had gone down the same way six months earlier, and the books themselves were no longer trusted
- Pricing a stock means trusting a profit figure. When that premise cracks, everything falls together
- Japan had its own problem too. With bank losses still uncleared, it was unusually exposed to outside shocks
- From the late-May high to the October low the index fell 29.55%
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 put together from the public record; where a specific source was consulted it is listed above.