WhyItDropped

S&P 500 · November 7, 2007

The autumn the write-downs grew

-2.94%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

The Global Financial Crisis bear market

early in it · 2007-10-09 → 2009-03-09, -56.78% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 7 November 2007 the S&P 500 fell 2.94%
  • Large banks were announcing write-downs on bad assets each quarter, and the numbers kept getting larger
  • Banks that had said the previous quarter was the end of it came back with bigger figures
  • So the market stopped believing the numbers. Nobody knew how large the losses really were
  • The index had set a record high a month earlier, on 9 October. That was the start of this stretch
  • In this stretch the index was 16.66% below its peak

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.