Economic News - 08/22/2015

Stock Market: Dow Plunges 530 Points and More Than 1,000 for the Week

Stocks were clobbered Friday on Wall Street — a brutal finish to the worst week in the market in four years. The Dow Jones industrial average closed down 530 points, the ninth-biggest point decline in its history.

CNBC,

22 August, 2015

Investors worried about signs of a slowdown in the Chinese economy that could hammer companies and countries around the world. The stock of Apple, which depends heavily on demand from China, fell more than 6 percent.

The Dow finished at 16,459. It fell more than 1,000 points this week alone and is down more than 10 percent from its all-time high in May — the definition of a market correction. That has not happened in four years.

The Dow's decline for the day came to 3.1 percent. The Standard & Poor's 500 index, a broader gauge of the stock market, finished down 3.2 percent and closed below 2,000 for the first time since early this year.

"Right now there is a feeling of fear in the marketplace, and all news is interpreted negatively and it's interpreted indiscriminately," Tom Digenan, the head of U.S. equities at UBS Global Asset Management, told CNBC.

In percentage terms, the decline on Friday was nowhere close to the worst of all time. On Black Monday in 1987, when the Dow fell 508 points, it represented a 22 percent decline.

The damage on Friday wasn't limited to Apple. John Deere stock fell more than 8 percent and Microsoft more than 5 percent. Energy stocks and technology stocks were hammered across the board.

Utility stocks, seen as a relatively stable bet in a rough market, fared the best, but even they were down more than 1 percent.

There was some good news in the sell-off: The price of crude oil plunged below $40 a barrel for the first time since the financial crisis in 2009. Gas has already fallen to a nationwide average of $2.63 a gallon — 80 cents lower than a year ago.

Stocks began falling last week when China announced that it was devaluing its currency, the yuan. Investors took it as a signal that the slowdown in the Chinese economy, the second-largest in the world, is worse than they had thought.

They got more evidence on Friday: A reading of business activity in China known as the Caixin purchasing index fell to 47.1. Anything below 50 suggests business activity is shrinking.

"China has been on a mission to keep up the illusion of a gradual slowdown, but dealers aren't buying it anymore," David Madden, a market analyst at the financial company IG, told The Associated Press.

The punishment for investors was global. Earlier in the day, the Shanghai stock market fell 4.3 percent, and the Nikkei index in Japan tumbled 3 percent to its lowest level in six weeks. European stocks fell more than 3 percent.

Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist who has warned for months that the market was overheated, told CNBC that "even bigger and bigger moves" could be in the offing.

He said he was confident that the Chinese economy would grow and said that the American housing market "has been going up at a good clip." But he warned that the market sell-off could spiral.

"When people who don't normally pay attention to the market are brought in," he told CNBC, "it can feed on itself like an epidemic."

Interview is from July 27

Steve Keen predicts massive China crash