Things aren’t getting any better on Wall Street:
Wall Street doubled down on its losses on Thursday, just a day after financial markets closed at their lowest point in nearly six years.
In a day dominated by fear and uncertainty, financial markets plunged in late trading, carving new lows, after spending much of the day bobbing between positive and negative territory. The Dow Jones industrial average was 444.99 points or 5.5 percent lower Thursday afternoon at the close. The wider Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index was down 54.14 points or 6.7 percent, adding to its losses after tumbling 6 percent on Wednesday. The Nasdaq fell 5 percent.
As stocks hopped from red to green and back again, investors continued to seek cover in safe havens like Treasury notes and gold, driving those prices higher. And a new report that jobless claims had crested to their highest levels in 16 years reminded investors that the frail economy continues to weaken.
“We think it’s going to continue to go lower,” said Ryan Detrick of Schaeffer’s Investment Research. “We don’t think people are scared enough. They’re just not showing enough fear. People are numb to this, they’re almost immune to it.”
On Thursday, the Labor Department reported that new claims for unemployment benefits rose to a seasonally adjusted 542,000 last week, the highest level since July 1992. On Capitol Hill, the Senate was expected to take up a bill extending unemployment assistance to people whose benefits have expired.
Economists said the swelling jobless numbers were creating a vicious circle between Wall Street’s losses and the afflictions of the broader economy.
“The profit drag on corporate America is widening and deepening, and this is leading to more layoffs and cutbacks in capital spending, which is extending and deepening the recession,” said Stuart Schweitzer, global markets strategist for J.P. Morgan Private Bank. “We’ve gotten into a full-blown, self-feeding downturn.”
While the Dow set another five-year low, by other measures the market is at levels it hasn’t seen since 1997
Here’s the S&P 500
and the NASDAQ index:
Not good at all.
November 21st, 2008 at 11:00 am
[...] today, November 20th, saw the lowest close in the stock market yet. And curiously, many of the TV analysts abandoned their unabatingly optimistic tones and began to [...]