WhyItDropped

Nikkei 225 · December 13, 1991

The end of a year cuts could not lift

+4.80%

single-day change vs previous close

Part of a longer stretch

When the bad loans surfaced

midway through · 1991-03-18 → 1992-08-18, -47.29% over the whole period

What happened that day?

  • On 13 December 1991 the Nikkei 225 rose 4.8%
  • The Bank of Japan had cut three times that year, and the index kept falling anyway
  • That summer it had emerged that major securities houses had quietly covered favoured clients' losses, and trust had gone
  • A market that will not rise on rate cuts is telling you that rates are not the problem
  • No single trigger can be pinned to this day
  • In this stretch the index was 34.19% 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.