The 1982 Souk Al-Manakh stock market crash happened in Kuwait.
Souk Al-Manakh was Kuwait’s unofficial, largely unregulated market for speculative trading in non-Kuwaiti companies. It grew after stricter rules were imposed on the country’s official exchange following a 1977 market crash. Investors shifted into the parallel market, where postdated checks effectively created enormous amounts of informal credit.
The bubble expanded dramatically: the combined value of listed shares reportedly rose from about $5 billion to $100 billion in a matter of months. The collapse began in August 1982 when a postdated check bounced. Kuwait’s Ministry of Finance subsequently ordered questionable checks to be submitted for clearance and shut the market down.
The crash was not merely a stock-market event. Worthless outstanding checks were estimated at roughly $94 billion, and nearly every Kuwaiti bank became technically insolvent except the National Bank of Kuwait. Falling oil revenues and the Iran–Iraq War helped spread the damage across the Gulf. A common mix-up is to identify a neighboring Gulf state, but Souk Al-Manakh was specifically Kuwait’s market.