Stocks Continue Wild Ride On Friday As Investigators Watch
The turbulence continued in the stock market Friday, a day after some of the most volatile trading in history.
Traders looked past a surprisingly strong report on the U.S. jobs market and focused instead on Europe’s spreading debt crisis and Thursday’s plunge, which gave the Dow its largest-ever drop. The Dow fell almost 1,000 points before recovering to a lost of 348.
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The Dow Jones industrials ended Friday with a loss of about 140 points, having been down almost 280 earlier. That followed a brief plunge of nearly 1,000 points on Thursday, the biggest one-day drop in the Dow’s history.
According to preliminary calculations, the Dow closed down 140, or 1.3 percent, at 10,380.
The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 17, or 1.5 percent, at 1,110, while the Nasdaq composite fell 54, or 2.3 percent, to 2,265.
President Barack Obama says regulatory authorities are looking into Thursday’s wild swings in the stock market with an eye toward protecting investors and preventing something like that from happening again.
A computerized sell-off sent the Dow Jones industrial average plummeting by a near-record 1,000 points within about a half-hour Thursday afternoon. Fear that the European debt crisis could spread was a factor. The market regained two-thirds of that loss before the end of trading.
Obama said he spoke Friday with German Chancellor Angela Merkel about the economic situation in Europe. He says they agreed on the need for a strong response by the affected countries and the international community.
