U.S. stocks tumbled more than 9% on Thursday, with Wall Street extended its dramatic slide into a bear market as the Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all crashed in response to the global COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.
Javier E. David, Emily McCormick, and Nishant Mohan for Yahoo Finance:
Weeks of panic-driven selling has dragged blue-chip stocks into bear market territory at a breathtaking pace, of less than a month from peak to trough. By Thursday’s close, the S&P 500 dropped 9.5%, or 260.62 points, in its largest percentage decline since the Black Monday crash of October 19, 1987. The blue-chip index slid more than 20% in total from its recent closing high from mid-February, sending it into a bear market. The Dow’s 9.99% decline Thursday was also the biggest since 1987, and constituted a drop of 2,352.6 points…
Amid the heightened market turmoil, the New York Federal Reserve stepped in midday Thursday and announced a major asset purchase program, offering $500 billion in three-month repo operations, an additional $500 billion in one-month operations and another at least $220 billion in operations with durations of two weeks or fewer.
The central bank also said its securities purchases would include a range of maturities, to match the composition of the Treasury market… Other proposals under consideration by the Trump administration included a payroll tax cut and expanded worker protections, to help counteract any economic fall-out from the ongoing coronavirus outbreak.
While some of these ideas have been met with resistance in the House, Eurasia Group’s Todd Marino wrote late Wednesday that “the snowballing impact of the coronavirus in coming weeks, combined with a White House push, will likely result in bipartisan alignment — rare in an election year — on [a] big-bang stimulus.”
MacDailyNews Take: Black Thursday II. Dare we hope for a sub-$200 Apple?