The growing COVID-19 crisis saw another sharp sell-off ahead of the close on Wall Street fall on Thursday, pushing key indexes into correction territory with a fall of 10% in the past week.
The key S&P 500 fell 4.4% on Thursday, the worst single-day slide for the market since August 2011.
That plunge has seen the index on track for its worst weekly performance since the 2008 financial crisis.
Stocks in Europe and Asia were also hard hit on Thursday.
The ASX 200, after being down around 90 points in overnight futures trading around 7am, plunged in the final half-hour of the session to be down 158 points at the close, or well over 2%.
The Aussie dollar traded under 66 US cents for all the session, touching a new 11 year low of 65.44 and was around 65.82 in early Asian dealings Friday morning.
US bond yields led yields globally lower – the rate on the 10 year US Treasury hit a new all-time low of just over 1.23%.
The sell-off came after public health officials in the US and Germany said new patients in each country had no known connection to others with the illness, a development that could complicate efforts to track the virus. Cases of the virus have appeared in at least 47 countries.
The Dow plunged almost 1,200 points – the second time this week it has lost more than 1,000 points in a session. But Thursday’s 1,190.95 slump was the largest.
The 4.42% for it and the S&P 500 losses were was echoes of the daily slides in late 2008 as the GFC deepened in the wake of the collapse of Lehman Bros.
The S&P 500’s 4.42 % loss was 137.63 points, while the Nasdaq, slumped 4.61% or 414.29 points.
Thursday’s losses brought the losses in the last five days to 11.82% for the Dow, 11.69% for the S&P 500 and 7.88% for the Nasdaq.
This means February is shaping up to be a rotten month and March could be no better.
European markets sold off heavily – the falls mostly 3% or more except for Italy which was off a still nasty 2.665%. The Stoxx 600 index shed 3.75%.
Yields on the key US 10 year Treasury bond tumbled to new record lows of 1.2392%, down from just over 1.30% the day before.
On Comex, gold for April delivery eased 60 cents at the end, or 0.04%, to settle at $US1,642.50 an ounce. Prices also fell on Tuesday and Wednesday, after settling at a seven-year high on Monday.
Gold had traded as high as $US1,662.50 on Thursday before retreating as more and more cases of the virus were reported from around the world.
Comex May silver shed 17.9 cents, or 1%, to end at $17.735 an ounce, following a loss of 1.9% Wednesday.
Comex copper continued to ease – down 0.08% for the May contract which settled at $US2.5715 a pound.
Oil futures fell again with global prices posting a fifth daily fall and hit new 14 month lows, driven by continuing worries about the rapid spread of the COVID-19 epidemic outside of China.
West Texas Intermediate crude for April delivery fell $US1.64, or 3.4%, to settle at $US47.09 a barrel in New York. That was the lowest front-month contract finish since early January 2019.
In Europe, April Brent crude dropped $US1.25, or 2.3%, to $US52.18 a barrel. The contract, which expires at Friday’s settlement, registered the lowest settlement since December 2018.
