|
|
|
Wednesday February 28, 5:15 AM
Wall St. slides three percent amid global market routWall Street shares went into a tailspin Tuesday following steep declines in global markets, with the main blue-chip Dow Jones index plunging 400 points or 3.17 percent at the final bell. At the closing bell, the Dow index had tumbled 400.00 points (3.17 percent) to 12,232.26 after plunging as much as 540 points moments earlier in a highly volatile session and the worst day on Wall Street since 2001.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite plummeted 94.19 points (3.76 percent) to 2,410.33 and the broad-market Standard and Poor's 500 index lost 48.52 points (3.35 percent) to a preliminary close of 1,400.84. The sharp slide came amid a tumble in global markets as fears about an economic slowdown in the United States and the end of the Chinese economic bubble triggered a global wave of selling. Analysts at Briefing.com called the action "one of the worst days for stocks in recent memory." "The sell-off in China continues to have a profound effect on stocks across the board, since the largest unwinding in the Shanghai Composite Index since 1997 leaves investors questioning the sustainability of stock gains everywhere," the analysts said in a note to clients. Asia was dragged down by a plummeting Shanghai stock market, Wall Street slumped, and the main European indices showed falls of between 2.0-3.0 percent on average at the close. Metal and mining stocks were particularly hard hit because of concerns about demand from China, which has been the driving force behind record prices for raw materials in recent years. In London, the FTSE 100 lost 2.31 percent to close at 6,286.10 points, in Paris the CAC 40 shed 3.02 percent to 5,588.39 points while in Frankfurt the Dax fell 2.96 percent to 6,819.65 points. Comments from former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and rising tension about Iran's nuclear program also served to undermine investor confidence. Greenspan had warned on Monday that the US economy had been expanding since 2001 and that there were signs that the current economic cycle was coming to an end.
|
|
Copyright ©
2007
AFP. All rights reserved. All information displayed in this section (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the contents of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presses.
|
