U.S. markets fall sharply as rampant volatility takes hold

Source: Washington Post

Investors unleashed their coronavirus fears Wednesday, sending U.S. markets into a tailspin. Nearly every asset class - stocks, bonds, gold, oil - came under siege as investors fled to the safety of cash. The weeks-long panic has hollowed out a big chunk of the stock gains from the bull market and erased virtually all of the equity advances under the Trump presidency.

Nothing was spared. Oil prices looked like they were reliving the 1970s, dropping 24 percent to near $20 per barrel for the commodity’s third-biggest rout in history. All 11 Standard & Poor’s sectors were in the red. The day’s poorest performers were in the travel and tourism sphere: Marriott down 34 percent. United Airlines, 33 percent. MGM Resorts, 30 percent. Alaska Air, 32 percent.

“The lamps are going out all across the economy,” JPMorgan Chase said in a report that forecasts a massive, 14 percent decline in gross domestic product in the second quarter. Boeing, once the showcase of the bull market, saw its stock drop below $100 per share, a quarter of its peak a year ago. Trump has pledged federal aid for the wheezing aerospace giant.

“If 2008 was the Great Financial Crisis, this is the Great Virus Crisis,” said Ed Yardeni, president of Yardeni Research. “It’s all at once a health crisis, financial crisis and economic crisis. We need to fix the health part of it before we have it solved, but we can take financial and fiscal steps to blunt its effects. We are starting to do that now.” All three major U.S. stock indexes are in a correction, having decline well over 20 percent from their highs.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/03/18/stocks-markets-today-coronavirus/