How far markets fell, from the coronavirus crash back to 1929

Education only, not financial advice. Figures come from official sources, each with its date; past market moves do not predict future ones. How we work

How did COVID affect the economy?

It produced the shortest US recession on record and the largest quarterly fall in output since quarterly GDP data begin in 1947. Real GDP fell 7.9% from the first to the second quarter of 2020, a 28.0% drop at an annualized rate; the previous worst quarter in the series, early 1958, was a 2.6% fall. The unemployment rate went from 3.5% in February 2020 to 14.8% in April, the highest reading since the series began in 1948. Then the economy bounced: GDP grew at a 34.9% annualized rate in the third quarter and was back at its late-2019 level by the first quarter of 2021.

The National Bureau of Economic Research, which dates US recessions, placed the peak in February 2020 and the trough in April 2020. Its committee wrote that the recession "lasted two months, which makes it the shortest US recession on record". We explain how that dating works, and why it took the committee until July 2021 to announce the end, on our page about the COVID recession.

Households did something unusual in the middle of it: they saved. The personal saving rate, which was 7.5% of disposable income in February 2020, reached 31.8% in April 2020 as spending stopped and government payments arrived. That pile of savings matters for what came next.

What happened to stock markets in 2020

The S&P 500 closed at a record 3,386.15 on February 19, 2020. Twenty-three trading days later, on March 23, it closed at 2,237.40: a fall of 33.9%. On March 16 alone it lost 12.0%, its worst day in the ten years of data published on FRED. The fall stopped after the Federal Reserve cut rates to near zero, started buying assets in large amounts and opened emergency lending programs, and after Congress passed the CARES Act. Our case file on the COVID stock market crash goes through it day by day.

The recovery was as fast as the fall. The S&P 500 closed above its February peak on August 18, 2020, 148 calendar days after the low. For comparison, the Nasdaq Composite needed until April 2015 to get back above its March 2000 peak and the 1929 crash took far longer still. The register at the top of this page draws each of those falls on one scale so the difference is visible at a glance; the history of stock market crashes puts the dates and recovery times in one table.

The second fall of the pandemic era came in 2022, when the S&P 500 dropped 25.4% from January 3 to October 12 as inflation and interest rates rose. By the usual convention that makes it a bear market. The index closed above its January 2022 high again on January 19, 2024.

Why prices rose after 2020

US consumer prices were rising 2.3% a year in February 2020. By June 2022 the year-on-year rate on the seasonally adjusted index was 9.0%, the highest since the early 1980s in the same series. In the UK, the ONS measure of CPI inflation peaked at 11.1% in October 2022. Taken together, US consumer prices in August 2026 were 28.9% higher than in February 2020.

Supply was one part of the story. The New York Fed's Global Supply Chain Pressure Index, which is zero when pressure is normal, hit a record 4.43 in December 2021. Demand, energy prices after Russia's invasion of Ukraine and labor shortages were the others. Our page on inflation after COVID sets out what the central banks and the IMF concluded, and what causes inflation covers the general mechanics.

• Effective federal funds rate
• Bank of England Bank Rate

Source: Federal Reserve via FRED, series FEDFUNDS; Bank of England, series IUDBEDR. Chart drawn by coronavirus.markets from the official file downloaded on October 6, 2026.

Central banks answered by raising rates in quick succession. The Bank of England raised Bank Rate fourteen times between December 2021 and August 2023, from 0.1% to 5.25%. The effective federal funds rate went from 0.20% in March 2022 to 5.33% in August 2023. Higher short-term rates pushed the US yield curve into its longest unbroken inversion since the data begin in 1976: 537 trading days, from July 2022 to August 2024. Our yield curve explainer covers why economists watch that signal and how often it has been wrong.

Where the numbers stand in 2026

These are the latest official readings in the files we downloaded on October 6, 2026. They describe the present; they say nothing about what markets will do next.

The S&P 500 closed at 7,773.95 on October 5, 2026, close to its record close in the file of 7,798.99 on August 13, 2026. Records say nothing about the next move, which is why we write about crashes as history and leave forecasts out.

How to use this archive

Start with the question you came with. If it is about a single event, the case files cover the 1929 crash, Black Monday 1987, the dot-com bubble, the 2008 financial crisis, the 2010 flash crash and, for the long view, tulip mania. If it is about a word in the news, the concepts section explains recessions, corrections, stagflation and bank runs with their official definitions.

Every figure on the site has a source and an access date at the bottom of its page, and every chart is drawn from the official file named under it. How we work explains the rules we follow, including the one that matters most here: this is education, not investment advice.