Nikkei 225 · November 25, 1997
The day a century-old brokerage closed
-5.11%
single-day change vs previous close
Part of a longer stretch
When the banks themselves failed
midway through · 1996-06-26 → 1998-10-09, -43.18% over the whole period
What happened that day?
- The Nikkei 225 fell 5.11% on the day
- The day before, one of Japan's four largest brokerages announced it would wind itself up. The firm was a century old
- It had been moving losses off its books and hiding them, on a scale it could no longer carry
- A large bank and another brokerage had already failed that same month. The long-standing assumption that big Japanese financial firms do not fail broke within those four weeks
- Korea asked the IMF for a bailout the same week. Funding across Asia was drying up at once
- This decline ran on to October of 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.