Monday, March 9th, 2009

A photograph taken on the floor of a vast excavation pit in the last hour before dawn, the sky a near-black indigo just thinning at the rim high above. The digging has stopped: the pit floor is bare swept bedrock, grey-blue stone with faint drill scars, and there is nothing further down. An excavator and a dump truck stand parked and dark at the edge of the floor, engines off, a single work lamp on a tripod throwing one pale pool of light onto the stone. Small in the frame, at the edge of the lamplight and seen from behind, stands a man in full clown makeup and a grey suit a half size too big — tidy lavender side-parted hair — perfectly still, facing the bare stone and the dark machines, his hands clasped behind his back holding a small brown paper bag. Above the rim, the first grey light of morning.

The darkest hour

S&P 500 676.53 · −6.85 · −1.00%

Not the loudest — this wing's loud days are all elsewhere. The darkest. An ordinary bad Monday that turned out to be the floor of a generation.

The photograph Retail at the Bedrock

The day's protagonist

Nobody — no symbol.

Move: The last seller, done — seventeen months and fifty-seven percent after the top

Nobody rang a bell; the house has written this before, on the other bottom's page. The morning's paper asked how low stocks could go. Buffett told television the economy had fallen off a cliff. Citigroup — a page ago the biggest bank of the boom — traded for about a dollar. Every rescue in this wing had already been spent, and belief was not the mechanism anyway: the last seller simply finished, at 676.53, one percent below Friday. The next morning a leaked Citi memo said the bank was profitable, the market rose 6.4%, and did not look back — the longest bull market ever recorded is measured from this close.

The deeper account

The wing's shape, complete: a false dawn, a pelt, a funeral, a failed vote, one ultramarine roar, the trench — and this, the smallest move of the seven, which is the one the era kept.

676.53 stands to this bear as 776.76 stood to the last one, and the two pages are written the same way: quiet register, a record row for the low, no ceremony. Bottoms do not announce themselves.

The devil's number is the feed's own record: 666.79, intraday, Friday March 6. The market put its generational low on it and moved on.

March 10's rally came on a leaked memo saying Citigroup was making money. After seventeen months, that was the entire good news required.

He is in the photograph of this day, down on the pit floor before first light. The digging had stopped; retail was still there. So was the morning.

Wing 3 closes here. Every later page in this book — the flash crashes, the pandemics, the manias — happens above this line.

The artifact

THE PIT · RECORD OF SOUNDINGS EXCAVATION RECORD DATE DEPTH MARK october 2007 — the surface 1,565.15 november 2008 — the old floor, passed 752.44 friday, march 6 — the last sounding 666.79 monday, march 9 676.53 — rock FOREMAN'S CLOSING ENTRY digging ended. nothing further down. APPENDED, THE NEXT MORNING first load went up. cause: a leaked memo — one bank was making money. SEVENTEEN MONTHS, MINUS FIFTY-SEVEN PERCENT, ONE QUIET MONDAY EVERY CHART OF THE ERA MEASURES FROM THIS LINE
The excavation record — the pit's last page, filled in by lamplight

The card carries no stamp — bottoms get no ceremony, and this one wasn't known to be a bottom until the low held. The soundings tell the wing whole: the surface of October 2007, the old floor given up in November, the devil's number touched in passing on Friday, and rock on an ordinary Monday. The foreman's entry is the only verdict the day ever issued.

Read the record

Printed text is shown plain; the foreman's entries are shown in script.

THE PIT · RECORD OF SOUNDINGS · EXCAVATION RECORD

  • october 2007 — the surface — 1,565.15
  • november 2008 — the old floor, passed — 752.44
  • friday, march 6 — the last sounding — 666.79
  • monday, march 9 — 676.53 — rock
  • FOREMAN'S CLOSING ENTRY: digging ended. nothing further down.
  • APPENDED, THE NEXT MORNING: first load went up. cause: a leaked memo — one bank was making money.
  • SEVENTEEN MONTHS, MINUS FIFTY-SEVEN PERCENT, ONE QUIET MONDAY · EVERY CHART OF THE ERA MEASURES FROM THIS LINE

The S&P 500 closed at 676.53 on Monday, March 9, 2009 — down 1.00 percent, the closing low of the financial crisis, 57 percent below the October 2007 peak. The intraday low of the bear, 666.79, had printed the previous Friday. On March 10 a leaked memo saying Citigroup was profitable sent the index up 6.4 percent, and the longest bull market on record is measured from this close.

The ledger — what actually happened

Measure Close Change Marginalia
S&P 500 676.53 −6.85 · −1.00% the closing low of the crisis — the level every chart of the era measures from
Dow Jones 6,547.05 −79.89 · −1.21% its own closing low, the same quiet Monday
From the peak 1,565.15 → 676.53 −57% in seventeen months — the deepest fall since the Depression
Three days earlier 666.79 the intraday low: the bear bottomed on the devil's number, and nobody laughed
What followed +64% by New Year and an eleven-year bull, the longest ever — begun in perfect disbelief

Sources

  1. CNBC — 10 years ago this week, the market hit the climactic bottom of the Great Recession — https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/04/the-10th-anniversary-of-the-climactic-march-2009-market-bottom-arrives-this-week.html
  2. CNBC — Pisani remembers Haines' legendary 2009 call — https://www.cnbc.com/2015/03/09/pisani-remembers-haines-legendary-2009-call.html
  3. Wikipedia — United States bear market of 2007–2009 — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_bear_market_of_2007%E2%80%932009
  4. The Wall Street Journal, March 9, 2009 — How low can stocks go?