The 1992 currency crisis that caused major turmoil in European stock markets was called Black Wednesday.
Black Wednesday occurred on September 16, 1992, when the United Kingdom withdrew the pound sterling from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. The government had tried to keep sterling within the mechanism’s required band, but intense market pressure made the policy increasingly difficult to maintain.
The crisis involved interest-rate changes, foreign-exchange intervention, and speculative attacks. George Soros became especially associated with the episode after his Quantum Fund reportedly made a large profit by betting against sterling. The event damaged the British government’s economic credibility, even though later assessments of its economic consequences were mixed.
Black Wednesday is often confused with stock-market crashes because equity markets also reacted to the turmoil. Its central event, however, was a currency and exchange-rate crisis rather than a single collapse in a stock index. The episode influenced later debates about monetary integration and the risks of fixed exchange rates.