The stock market hasn't even been open for 30 minutes, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has dropped below 7,000, for the first time since October 1997.
The drop comes as news that AIG will receive $30 billion more in TARP funds hits investors, as well as the AIG announcement that it lost $61.7 billion in Q4 2008.
Stocks dropped worldwide:
- The FTSE 100 index in London dropped 3.9 percent.
- The CAC 40 in Paris fell 3.3 percent.
- The DAX in Frankfurt fell 2.7 percent.
- The Tokyo Nikkei 225 stock average fell 3.8 percent
- The S&P/ASX 200 in Sydney fell 2.8 percent.
- The Hang Seng index in Hong Kong dropped 3.9 percent.
Impressively bad.
Bill Strazzullo, chief market strategist for Bell Curve Trading feels that unless the housing market stabilizes, there's a good chance the Dow and the S&P 500 will drop to their 1995 levels of 5,000 and 500, respectively. He told AP:
"As bad as things are, they can still get worse, and get a lot worse."
Dwyfor Evans, a strategist at State Street Global Markets in Hong Kong told the NY Times:
“It’s pretty despondent everywhere. O.K., there are signs that some of the leading indicators have stabilized to some extent, but it’s at a very, very low level, and we’re not seeing corporate investment picking up, or consumers starting to spend again — in other words, the traditional mechanisms by which economies come out of a recession are absent at this time.”
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