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Source (with a more interactive graph): STOXX® Europe 600 Banks
This is a chart of the STOXX Europe 600 Banks index from January 1987 to March 2020. Curiously, in the last few days, we've seen this index hit levels it last reached in the 1987 to 1988 time period.
As European bank stocks were falling, Neil Irwin wrote an article for The NY Times on March 12, 2020 titled Something Weird Is Happening on Wall Street, and Not Just the Stock Sell-Off. He wrote in his piece:
"Underneath the headline numbers were a series of movements that don’t really make sense when lined up against one another. They amount to signs — not definitive, but worrying — that something is breaking down in the workings of the financial system, even if it’s not totally clear what that is just yet."
