Markets · Long view
Crises & events.
The S&P 500 since 1970, annotated. Toggle wars, politics, tech, disasters and finance to see how the market absorbed each headline — and kept compounding.
Log scale · nominal dollars · hover the chart to scrub years
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Events in Range
- 1970Invasion of Cambodia
- 1971Nixon ends gold standard
- 1972Nixon visits communist China
- 1973Yom Kippur War & oil embargo
- 1974Nixon resigns
- 1975Fall of Saigon
- 1976Concorde's first commercial flight
- 1977Apple II computer
- 1978Space Invaders triggers video-game craze
- 1979Three Mile Island accident
- 1979Soviet Union invades Afghanistan
- 1980Reagan elected
- 1981First IBM PC demonstrated
- 1981Reagan fires air-traffic controllers
- 1982Falkland Islands War
- 1984Apple launches Macintosh
- 1985Reagan & Gorbachev meet
- 1986Space Shuttle Challenger explosion
- 1987Black Monday
- 1989Fall of the Berlin Wall
- 1990Iraq invades Kuwait
- 1991Cold War ends
- 1992Maastricht Treaty
- 1994Nelson Mandela elected president of S. Africa
- 1995Oklahoma City bombing
- 1996Taliban rises to power
- 1997AI wins first chess match
- 1998First US budget surplus in 30 years
- 1999EU launches the Euro
- 2000Bull market ends; tech bubble deflates
- 20019/11 terrorist attacks
- 2002Birth of Homeland Security
- 2003US invades Iraq
- 2004Facebook is launched
- 2005Hurricane Katrina
- 2006Saddam Hussein executed
- 2007Birth of the iPhone
- 2008Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy
- 2008Obama elected
- 2009H1N1 declared global pandemic
- 2010Deepwater Horizon oil spill
- 2011Osama bin Laden killed
- 2013Boston Marathon bombing
- 2014Ukraine (Crimea) crisis
- 2014ISIS begins offensive in Iraq
- 2015First NASA spacecraft past Pluto
- 2016Trump elected
- 2017Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria
- 2018Deadliest wildfires in CA history
- 2020First confirmed COVID-19 case in US
- 2021First all-civilian crew goes to space
- 2022Russia invades Ukraine
- 2022Biden signs Inflation Reduction Act
- 2023Silicon Valley Bank collapse
- 2023Hamas attacks Israel
- 2025Trump signs exec. order on tariffs
Inspired by First Trust's Crises & Events chart. Annual S&P 500 total returns (with dividends) from Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern. Year-resolution data smooths over single-day shocks like the 1987 Black Monday drop. Past performance is not a forecast.