Source : THE AGE NEWS
With almost $100 billion wiped off the Australian sharemarket on Monday, the fallout from Donald Trump’s reciprocal tariffs is starting to hit home for local investors.
It isn’t the first time that the ASX has experienced a sharp one-day drop. Throughout recent history, there have been instances where markets have been sent into a similar panic.
Panic at the Sydney Stock Exchange in 1987 as markets tumbled following Black Monday in the US.Credit: Antonin Cermak
Shane Oliver, chief economist and head of investment strategy at AMP, says that Trump’s trade announcements have been creating “instant fear” among investors.
“We have seen these sorts of things before, but they’re all a little bit different. Some occur as sharp falls straight down. Others unfold over many months with occasional sharp falls, rallies, and then more sharp falls,” Oliver says.
“The old line ‘history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes’ applies to sharemarkets. You get these occasional pullbacks every so often … [but] how it unfolds is slightly different.”
The Sydney Morning Herald, October 20 1987.Credit: Sydney Morning Herald
Here are some of the most memorable drops experienced by the Australian sharemarket in recent history.
Black Monday (October 19, 1987)
Perhaps the most severe and unexpected crash happened in the late 1980s when the US sharemarket recording its largest one-day drop.
On that day, sometimes referred to as Black Tuesday due to time zone differences, the Herald reported an unprecedented 25 per cent drop from the Australian sharemarket. The Dow Jones lost 508 points, while trading in Hong Kong and Wellington was suspended.
The crash sparked global fears of a repeat of the Great Depression, which had lasted from 1929 until 1939. Experts found it difficult to explain its exact cause.
“There were some changes in the US,” Oliver says, “[But] nothing dramatic justifying it. It was accelerated by market forces themselves,” Oliver says.
“That was probably the most shocking [drop]. It was hard to pin it down to the fundamental drivers. The sharemarket had a big run-up before that, and there were question marks about it being overvalued.”
The ASX went on to have a 50 per cent fall spread across two months, Oliver says, before it slowly began to recover.
Global financial crisis (September 2008)
Prompted by a downturn in the US housing market around mid-2007 and lasting until mid-2009, the global financial crisis was one of the worst market crashes in recent history, the ASX falling nearly 50 per cent from peak to trough over the two-year period.
The Australian Securities Exchange on September 30, 2008.Credit: Reuters
This was despite Australia getting off relatively lightly compared to the rest of the world, avoiding recession and any major economic downturns, though many people’s retirement savings were significantly reduced.
“That was similar to [Monday’s drop] in that there was a lead in from Wall Street … even though there were shocking falls, they can easily be related to economic developments,” Oliver says.
It took nearly 10 years for the ASX to return to the level it was pre-GFC.
Markets across the world plummeted during the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020. Credit: Getty
COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020)
A crash that most Australians will remember well, the COVID pandemic of March 2020 sent markets tumbling globally, the ASX falling more than 30 per cent following announcements of lockdowns, store closures and purchasing restrictions. The worst of this was on March 16, where the ASX200 fell by 9.7 per cent – the largest one-day fall in more than 30 years.
Oliver says parallels can be drawn between the pandemic’s market falls and recent ones, with the full extent of COVID’s hit to the economy unknown at the time, similar to the current reaction to Trump’s tariffs.
It took just 14 months for the ASX to recover to pre-COVID levels.
The Trump administration (April 2025)
The decline in US shares since “Liberation Day” on April 2 has been rapid (and the fourth-fastest two-day fall on Wall Street since World War II, according to Oliver).
The reciprocal tariffs have sent shockwaves through global markets. But the full impacts are yet to be seen.
“We know Trump is sensitive to how people think about him. And the sharemarket is a bit of a barometer of that … it could be weeks or a month or two before [he backtracks] … we just don’t know with Trump; he’s quite hard to predict,” Oliver says.
David Bassanese, chief economist at BetaShares, says Monday’s crash is also unusual because it can be traced back to one single policy.
“The question now is not whether or not the US will go into recession with these policies. It’s whether or not Trump relents before they do cause a recession,” he says.
“It’s like the ship’s been hit by an iceberg. We know that the ship has been hit … and the markets are now debating ‘is that going to sink the ship or not?’”
