S&P 500 · August 5, 2019
The day the yuan went past seven
-2.98%
single-day change vs previous close
What happened that day?
- On 5 August 2019 the S&P 500 fell 2.98%
- Days earlier the US had announced new tariffs on Chinese goods
- That morning the yuan weakened past seven to the dollar for the first time in eleven years
- A weaker currency offsets the price increase a tariff creates. The market read it as a deliberate answer
- That evening the US Treasury formally labelled China a currency manipulator
- This was the moment the fight moved from tariffs to money, and it became much harder to picture where it ended
- From the peak the index was down 6.12% and recovered within the 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.